For years, India’s SaaS story was written for global markets. The pricing models, product choices, and growth playbooks came from what worked overseas. It made sense because global buyers were ready, payments were easier, and validation came faster. But a quiet shift is now visible across Indian cities. More founders are building SaaS products for Indian businesses not because it is simpler, but because it finally feels worth building for.
Selling software locally is not new. Every city has long had IT firms that made custom tools for nearby clients. What is new is how these founders are approaching it as product builders, not project vendors. They are turning local understanding into scalable SaaS. That shift demands a different kind of thinking. It is not about cheaper software; it is about smarter empathy. Products have to be simple enough for self-serve adoption yet flexible enough to match the sensibilities of Indian small businesses work that is fast, informal, and deeply relational.
In Surat, that change feels organic. The city’s IT base, built over years of contract work, is now giving rise to founders who understand both code and commerce. Denish Patel and Jay Patel, co-founders of AdKrity, represent this evolution. Early in their journey, they realized something many overlook: Indian businesses do not want tools to run ads, they want customers. They do not ask for more features or time-saving options; they want visible results. That insight guided AdKrity from the start. After years in ad-tech with JustDial, Directi, and Media.net, Denish returned to build software that helps small and medium businesses run digital ads without jargon or agencies. The product’s goal is not to automate marketing; it is to deliver customers.
At the eChai × Video SDK Diwali Gathering in Surat, Denish spoke about how much of AdKrity’s journey grew through proximity and community. Parthiv Patel of Petpooja connected him with Meta, which became an early partner. Naman Sarawagi from Refrens introduced him to Gagan Goyal of India Quotient, who, through their First Cheque fund, led AdKrity’s first round. When AdKrity was just starting out, Denish rented his first office from Manoj Advani, founder of Narad.io and lead for eChai Surat. Progress often begins with conversations between founders in informal settings.
As The Rough Guide to Building an Enterprise SaaS Dhandha in India by Blume Ventures observes, the Indian SaaS landscape runs on proximity and persistence. Deals are closed through conversations, not campaigns, and early traction often depends more on credibility than marketing. That is visible in AdKrity’s journey too. It grew through referrals, partnerships, and trust, the same instincts that have long defined Indian business, now expressed through software.
There is also a perception that Indian businesses do not pay for tools or software. Denish believes otherwise. If you deliver value and help them gain customers, they are willing to pay, as proven by platforms like Justdial, IndiaMART, and TradeIndia. What matters is not whether Indian businesses will pay, but whether the product directly helps them earn. As Blume’s essay notes, applying Western SaaS models blindly does not work in India; the market rewards relevance over process.
Across cities like Surat, Pune, Indore, Ahmedabad, and Jaipur, this quiet localization of intelligence continues to grow. Some see it as a shift inward, others as a sign of maturity. Either way, the pattern is clear. The most thoughtful builders are staying close to what they know best. Sometimes, that closeness turns out to be the smartest form of scale.
Every emerging startup ecosystem has a few companies that quietly hold it together. They begin early, grow patiently, and create the talent base from which everything else emerges. In Surat, one of those rare companies is Narola InfoTech.
Long before Surat’s founders started using words like “startup” or “ecosystem,” Narola had already built one of the city’s first large-scale IT operations. It was one of the very few companies that showed what it meant to build seriously from Surat. For many people, Narola was where someone in the family worked, a cousin, a college friend, a neighbour, or a colleague. The company became a quiet common thread across the city’s tech generation, a place where ambition met its first opportunity.
At the eChai × Video SDK Diwali gathering, that connection came alive again. Every few conversations found their way back to Narola. Someone mentioned their co-founder had worked there. Someone else said their brother still does. A few people smiled at old memories of applying for their first job interview there. In Surat, everyone seems to have a Narola story.
What stands out about Ashish Narola and his team is the way they continue to show up for the community. When they host eChai meetups, community gatherings, or founder sessions at the Narola campus, the atmosphere always feels open and generous. Many companies today approach community engagement as part of their growth strategy, which has its own merit. Narola approaches it as a natural extension of how they have always built. It feels more like paying it forward than marketing.
With Narola AI Studio, the company has built a dedicated vertical for developing and deploying AI solutions. The studio works on automation, analytics, and intelligent systems for e-commerce and enterprise clients. It brings together Narola’s software expertise with applied AI to help businesses operate faster, make better use of data, and deliver smarter customer experiences.
Every city that wants to build a meaningful startup culture needs companies like Narola, the ones that start early, stay consistent, give more than they take, and grow alongside their people. Surat is fortunate to have a few of them, and Narola has been one of the most enduring.
The eChai × VideoSDK Diwali party in Surat brought together a room full of founders who’ve spent years building through uncertainty. What began as a light evening, stories, laughter, and the usual updates, slowly turned into something else. People started talking about the moments that shaped them, not the ones they post about.
It felt like an oral history of the startup ecosystem in Surat. Founders from different stages and backgrounds, connected by the same vibe of losing, learning, and starting again.
When Chetan Kanani, co-founder of Alpino, began speaking, the room settled. He talked about the night Alpino’s warehouse caught fire in Surat. The speed of it, the shock, and how by morning, everything they had built was gone.
He said the hardest moment wasn’t the fire itself, but the silence after. Walking into the burnt space with his team and realizing there was no plan, no instruction manual for what came next. They just started again, cleaning the site, calling vendors, building piece by piece.
At one point, Chetan said, “It shouldn’t happen to anyone… but sometimes I feel like it should. Kabhi-kabhi aag lagni chahiye.”
The room went still. Nobody took it as a punchline. What he meant was clear, that sometimes, the only way to see what truly matters is when everything unnecessary burns away. The fire stripped Alpino down to its foundation. What survived wasn’t luck; it was intent.
For founders, those moments of collapse become quiet turning points. They don’t show up in headlines, but they change everything, how you hire, how you decide, how you think about growth. The comeback isn’t about proving resilience; it’s about rebuilding with a sharper sense of what’s worth keeping.
As the night went on, the lights reflected off the burnt-orange walls of the old Surat building. Conversations drifted back to product launches and ideas. But that one line stayed with everyone. Aag lagni chahiye. Said softly, meant deeply, a reminder that sometimes, what breaks you is the same thing that clears the way for what’s next.
Over the years, eChai has grown from a small group of founders in Ahmedabad to a global network connecting entrepreneurs across cities and time zones. We have active chapters in India, growing ones in Dubai and Singapore, and a thriving community in the Bay Area. Each city carries its own setup, but what makes eChai special everywhere is the same: founders helping founders, without pretense.
San Francisco wasn’t always one of our most active chapters. We had done a few meetups when someone from eChai was visiting from India, but the consistency wasn’t there yet. That changed when Khyati Brahmbhatt decided to take the lead.
In February 2025, when Khyati was visiting India, I invited her to one of our eChai meetups in Ahmedabad. It was a typical founder evening, lively, curious, full of conversations that carried on late into the night. During that chat, she asked, “Let me know if you plan to do anything in San Francisco.” I said, “We already do, but not as frequently as in other cities.” She smiled and said, “I can help you with anything that you need.” That simple offer was the start of everything that followed.
Living in the United States, Khyati understood the founder diaspora, people who had moved for opportunity but missed the sense of belonging that eChai represents. She started small. A few mixers. A dinner. A food-truck social. Then partnerships with Zoom HQ, San José State University, and Playground Studios. She also brought key restaurants like Rooh, Fitoor, and Ettan into the mix for founder dinners. Each gathering felt intentional. She treated every event like a product, observe what works, improve what doesn’t, and make sure people leave feeling connected.
That steady approach transformed eChai San Francisco into what it is today: a familiar home for founders traveling from India and a local community for those building in the Bay Area. It carries the same openness as our Indian chapters, but adapted to a global context. And now, Khyati is extending that blueprint across North America.
She builds communities the way great product and growth leaders build teams: with empathy, clarity, and the confidence that small iterations compound faster than grand gestures. You can see that thinking in everything she does, in how she listens to feedback after every event, how she notices what keeps founders coming back, and how she quietly improves the experience without making it look like a strategy. It’s about designing trust, one experience at a time, until people start to feel like they belong without being told they do.
As Khyati now lays out her plans for eChai North America, I’m excited to see what’s next, for her, for the founders she connects, and for this journey we’ve started together. If the past eight months are any indication, the best chapters of this story are still to come.
In cities, power rarely announces itself. You can feel it in the way traffic lights favor certain routes, in how park benches are missing in some neighborhoods, or how some areas stay forever under construction while others get beautified every election cycle.
For years, I’ve thought of this as the invisible hand of urban planning, quiet, consistent, shaping lives without debate.
Now, that same invisible hand is moving into the digital space. Algorithms have become our new city planners. They decide who gets seen, who gets heard, and who gets forgotten. The question I keep asking is simple: who plans the algorithm, and who lives in its blind spots?
In the episode “The Ethics of AI Assistants” from Google DeepMind: The Podcast, Iason Gabriel, Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, spoke about a future where “millions or billions of agents” could act on our behalf. He called it “a world quite different from the one we live in now.” When AI systems begin to make choices for us, much like city bureaucracies do, the consequences compound invisibly.
Gabriel also noted that these assistants will be “plugged into different kinds of tools that will allow them to take action in the world.” That is the moment when algorithms stop being reflections and start becoming actors, when a line of code can move resources, shape opportunity, or quietly deny it.
If algorithms are the new governance, then ethics must become the new activism.
Just as citizens once demanded transparency from municipalities, we now need to demand it from models. Cities and systems both need public scrutiny; otherwise, progress becomes a gated colony.
“When we launched LegalWiz.in back in 2016, concept of procuring legal and compliance services through a digital commerce platform wasn't as prominent in India. eChai played a significant role in providing the early adopters, and building significant positioning in the startup fraternity. Overtime, eChai grew to be a massive network of like-minded entrepreneurs and extended that benefit to all the members in a true "co-rise" spirit. I personally love to attend eChai events, learn from subject matter experts who share relatable and actionable insights and experiences. For startup journeys, it is so important to be surrounded by people who can add relevance, perspective, and push you to do better. Most importantly a group of people where you aren't being judged about things going right or wrong, but be a motivational force that keeps you going, yet keeping you in check. eChai is that place for me!”
Shrijay Sheth
Founder at LegalWiz.in and Hire4Higher Consulting
"eChai isn’t just a startup community … it’s a mindset . eChai has been one of the most impactful communities in my entrepreneurial journey. It’s been a turning point . In a world where building something can often feel isolating, eChai gave me a sense of belonging. I’ve found mentors, collaborators, and friends here — people who genuinely want to see you succeed. It’s a space where ideas are challenged, actions are celebrated, and founders grow not just in scale, but in clarity and confidence. From late-night ideas to early-morning pitches, this community has quietly but powerfully shaped the way I build, think, and dream. I’ll always be grateful for the way eChai creates spaces where founders don’t just grow businesses — they grow together."
Koumal Kalantry
Founder, Bignano Ventures
"eChai has been a game changer in my journey. It connected me with real people, real support and real opportunities. From building HMMBiz to launching Mindalcove, eChai has played a key role at every step. Grateful to be part of a community that truly believes in growing together."
Hardik Manwani
CTO, Mind Alcove
eChai Partner Brands
eChai Ventures partners with select brands as their growth partner - working together to explore new ideas, open doors, and build momentum across the startup ecosystem.
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