The spirit of Karekeba — Must do it for Bihar!

1. The cheque nobody was writing.

By the second wave of Covid-19, the migrant trains coming into Danapur, Saharsa and Katihar were carrying a different kind of passenger from the one the national television cameras had filmed in 2020. Many of them were not labourers. They were chefs, salon owners, mid-level IT engineers, small-scale exporters, hospitality managers — people who had built a small business or a serious skill outside Bihar, watched it collapse in eight weeks, and come home with a plan to start again. The plan was the same plan, over and over: I can do this in Patna for one-third the cost. I just need a small cheque, and someone who has done this before to tell me what I am about to get wrong.

In late 2020 in Bihar, neither of those two things existed in any organised form. The state had IIT Patna's incubator, a handful of CSR-funded accelerators, and a young Bihar Startup Policy (2017, refreshed) that issued seed grants — but no resident angel network, no syndicate, no organised pool of risk capital that a founder in Begusarai could pitch on a Tuesday and hear back from on a Friday. The phrase "angel investor in Bihar" returned, on a Google search that year, exactly zero results that were not press releases for an event in Bengaluru.

2. Five founders, one geography.

The conversation that became Karekeba Ventures began, like most things in 2020, on a WhatsApp group. Anubha Prasad — BIT Sindri, MDI Gurgaon, 23 years at SIDBI appraising and funding small businesses, more recently with the United Nations Environment Programme — had already quit her UN job in October 2020 and moved back to Patna to do exactly this. Kshitiz Anand — IIT Guwahati and Indiana University, a design leader who had been an AVP at Paytm and an Acumen Fellow — was the one who would later name and brand the firm. Divyanshu Verma brought IIT Delhi and IIM Bangalore, with two US patents and senior stints at Intel, Dell and Ericsson. Kunal Kishore and Manish Pathak completed the founding line-up: operators with deep enterprise, policy and capital-markets experience, both of whom had spent the bulk of their careers outside Bihar but had quietly never stopped looking for a way back.

The five did not, on paper, look like a venture firm. They looked like a reunion. That, it turned out, was the point. Every one of them had personally fielded the same call in the previous twelve months — a cousin, a school classmate, a neighbour's son, asking for the same advice on the same kind of small business. "We realised we were already doing this," Anubha would later say, "as a courtesy, in our spare time, badly. The decision was simply to do it properly, together, with a chequebook."

3. A name borrowed from the street.

Kare-ke-ba. In Bhojpuri it is two things at once: a statement of intent and an instruction to oneself. The closest English translation is somewhere between must do it and have to do it — the verb is in the imperative, but the speaker is the same person being commanded. Anand chose it deliberately. Bihari pride is, very often, a defensive emotion: a list of what the state once was, deployed against what outsiders assume it is now. Karekeba was meant to be the opposite — a forward-facing verb, in the language of the street, without an apology in it.

The visual identity followed the same logic. No tricolour, no temple silhouette, no map of Bihar in the logo. A plain wordmark, in a quiet sans-serif, on the pitch decks and the term sheets. The brief, internally, was that the brand should look like a firm that already existed for ten years, not a firm that was being built in a borrowed conference room in Boring Road.

4. The portfolio, and what it signals.

Karekeba's first cheque, in early 2021, went to Hanuman — a Patna-based last-mile delivery startup running an emergency healthcare logistics layer across the city. The deal was not large. It was something more important: it was the first publicly disclosed seed round in Bihar in which the lead investor was a Bihar-resident, Bihar-registered angel platform. The subsequent cohort built out, deliberately, across the categories that map onto the state's real economy rather than its aspirational one — healthcare logistics, vernacular edtech, SMB-tech, repair and after-sales services, mobility, agri deep-tech, and most recently BFSI infrastructure plays serving the Tier-II and Tier-III lending market.

Reported portfolio names across Karekeba's first acceleration cohort and seed investments include Hanuman (emergency healthcare delivery, Patna), Fydo (formerly Lyfd, hyperlocal commerce, Jamshedpur), EdUncle (competitive-exam edtech, Kota), Repair My Mobile, Cymatic, Doot Cabs, StylePure, Robo Bionics and E-Panipuri Kartz, among others. By mid-2022 the firm publicly disclosed it had backed eight startups with cheque sizes ranging from roughly ₹50 lakh to ₹2 crore, and was syndicating into larger rounds alongside other networks. None of the companies relocated to Bengaluru. Hanuman stayed in Patna. Fydo stayed in Jamshedpur. EdUncle stayed in Kota. That, more than any single return multiple, is the line on the dashboard the founders care about.

"The fact is that startups have woken up to the might of the small-town-India markets. Given the right access to mentorship, network and capital, there is no reason migration to metros should happen. We need more Karekebas across India."

The structural choices behind the portfolio matter as much as the names in it. Karekeba runs a five-stage curation — sourcing, scrub, mentor review, investor syndication and term-sheet — that consciously borrows from SIDBI and from Y Combinator in equal parts. Its revenue model is concessional: a 1–3% fee on funded transactions, below the standard angel-platform fee elsewhere, which is the firm's way of saying out loud that the point is to get cheques written, not to extract rent from the act of writing them.

5. Why this mattered for Startup Bihar.

The thing that is easy to miss, from outside the state, is that Karekeba's most important contribution is not any single investment. It is the existence of a category. Once one resident, professionally-managed angel platform exists in Patna, the next founder pitching at IIT Patna's E-Cell, or at Bihar Startup Conclave, or at a college fest in Muzaffarpur, does not need to be told that angel capital is a thing that happens in their state. They have seen it happen, by name, in a press release. That changes what they ask for, how they structure their cap table, and whether they bother to register the company with a Bihar address at all.

The downstream signal travels further than the cheques themselves. The Bihar Industrial Investment Promotion Policy 2016 (and subsequent refreshes), the Bihar Startup Policy 2022, the BIA's Bihar Connect series, the Bihar Business Connect investor summits — every one of these instruments now has, in the background, an answerable case study for the question a visiting Bengaluru GP always asks: name one institutional, Bihar-based angel investor.Until 2020, the honest answer was a long pause. After 2020, the answer is Karekeba — and, more importantly, the small but real number of syndicates, family offices and operator-angels that have come into being around it.

The macro context is moving the same way. Over 50% of DPIIT-recognised startups in India are now in Tier-II and Tier-III cities; the Nasscom–Zinnov Tech Start-up Ecosystem report tracked a 3x rise in investment and 2x rise in seed-stage deals into emerging hubs between 2019 and 2021 alone. Bihar's slice of that pie is still under-represented relative to its population. The arithmetic problem is well-known. The institutional problem — the absence of an organising node — is the one Karekeba addressed first.

6. The diaspora fund that comes next.

The next chapter, currently in formation, is a SEBI-registered alternative investment vehicle — a dedicated fund, anchored by Karekeba's general partners and structured to take in capital from the Bihari diaspora. The logic is straightforward and, in hindsight, obvious. Bihar has, by most estimates, the largest internal-migrant footprint of any Indian state and a disproportionately well-placed external diaspora in the Gulf, the United Kingdom, the United States, Singapore and Australia. A meaningful fraction of that diaspora has, for a decade, been looking for a credible, professionally managed instrument through which to back companies in their home state — without becoming the cousin who has to chase a quarterly update.

A fund solves three problems an angel platform structurally cannot. It writes larger follow-on cheques into the same companies in subsequent rounds, which keeps Bihari ownership on the cap table as a company scales. It allows non-resident Indians to participate through a regulated channel rather than a one-off SPV. And it converts what is today an episodic, relationship-driven investor base into a renewable pipeline of capital. The thesis the team is expected to take to limited partners is recognisably Karekeba: the same sectoral focus, the same insistence on companies being domiciled in Bihar, the same five-stage diligence — only now with the balance-sheet depth to do Series A and Series B alongside the original seed cheque.

If it works — and at the time of writing, the architecture is in place but the first close is not yet announced — it will be the first Bihar-domiciled, Bihar-thesis fund of any meaningful size in the post-2014 AIF era. That is a small sentence with a large amount of policy weight behind it.

7. The unfinished argument.

Karekeba is not, on its own, the answer to Bihar's industrial question. The state still has a per-capita income roughly half the Indian average; its factor markets — land, power, logistics — still impose a cost penalty on any manufacturer comparing Patna to Pune; its public-sector investment promotion apparatus is still rebuilding muscle. None of that will be fixed by an angel network, however well-run.

What an angel network does is unrelated and equally important. It changes the set of stories a young founder in Bihar is allowed to tell themselves about what is possible. For a long time, the only honest narrative was build here, scale elsewhere. Karekeba's quiet bet is that, given a written cheque, a working mentor and a credible follow-on round, more and more of those founders will choose build here, scale from here. The Bhojpuri name was always the argument. Karekeba. Must do it. Have to do it. In Bihar, for Bihar.