Atanuu Agarrwal

Atanuu is the Co-founder of Upside AI, a fintech start-up that aims to revolutionise the investment space with the help of machine learning. Atanuu has over 11 years of investment experience. He has extensive experience in public and private investing both in India and the US. He has worked across PE, VC and SPACs (AUM $1bn) with Vedanta Capital for over 7 years. As Vice President, he has worked closely on investments worth over $500 million. These include, early stage investments in the biotech, digital health, medical devices, and SAAS sectors and late stage investments in financial services, education, telecom and pharma sectors. Prior to Vedanta, he worked with Credit Suisse Investment Banking on European mergers and acquisitions. With a B.tech and M.tech in Materials Science from the renowned, IIT Bombay, he graduated in the top 10% of his class. Atanuu’s passion for investing sprouted at an early stage while he was still pursuing his education. Atanuu enjoyed investing so much that he decided to pursue a career in asset management right out of college, without any formal training in finance. ‘Equity Investing’, he philosophically explains; by its nature, comes without any guarantees, where discipline is the key to achieving any kind of success. Inspired by his personal bibles, Benjamin Graham’s ‘The Intelligent Investor’ and ‘Security Analysis’ by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd, he founded Upside AI along with his two other co-founders. The aim was to create something unique at the intersection of fundamentals-based investing and technology, which would eliminate emotional bias from the process of investing and adopt a systematic and disciplined approach to drive outperformance. Atanuu very closely follows the principles of Benjamin Graham as well as Warren Buffet and looks up to them for business inspiration. Their innate capability to bring humility, honesty and approachability to a domain that seems quite intimidating are principles on which Upside AI was founded. Simplicity, clear articulation and the ability to acknowledge one's mistakes is what sets him apart from the rest when it comes to business strengths. Upside AI reflects the very personality of its founder and his principles. As with his professional life, Atanuu approaches his interests and hobbies in his personal life with the same passion and fervour. At the top of that list is sports, with icons Rafael Nadal and Michael Schumacher being two sportsmen he admires the most. Their grit, perseverance and hunger to keep improving and winning despite experiencing wild success is what he tries to inculcate in himself. Cricket, especially Test Cricket, is his primary obsession and if given a chance he’d watch it round the clock. Additionally, as a group, his co-founders and he love playing strategy-based board games. He is a proud owner of over 50 different board games. His motto for Upside AI remains to build a scalable business which is sustainable and can create organic conversions. For him, the success of Upside AI is in the quality of the relationships they build with their clientele rather than the volumes brought in. With strong business acumen and a special camaraderie between its founders, Upside AI has profitably scaled up its business 5X in the last two years, while being completely bootstrapped i.e., without the help of any external financing.