How Building a Startup at IIMA Led Me to Venture Capital

By Aniket Niranjan Mishra | PGP 2026

When I joined IIM Ahmedabad in 2024, I had a fairly clear plan. I was going to join investment banking. I had the profile for it. Five years at IIT Kharagpur across metallurgical engineering and financial engineering. Two years at American Express, building machine learning models for fraud detection. A CFA Level 2 under my belt. The MBA was supposed to be the final piece. I would network through the summers, land a banking role, and get on with it.

That is not what happened.

I did get the banking internship. I spent the summer at Citi, and I learned a lot. But I also learned something I had not expected. I did not enjoy the work the way I thought I would. The problems were interesting in the abstract, but day-to-day, I missed the feeling of building something. At Amex, even though I was in a large organization, I had ownership over models. I built a first-generation deep learning model for fraud detection that handled over 10 billion parameters. I could see it working. I could see the results. At Citi, the work was solid, but it did not give me that same pull.

Around the same time, something else was happening on campus that I was getting much more excited about. I had started working on Darpan Labs, an AI-powered B2B SaaS platform that built digital twins of customers for market research. The idea came out of the IIMA Ventures Mavericks Challenge, and our team ended up winning first place among 40-plus teams. And that process stayed with me.

I loved thinking about the problem. I loved figuring out what to build, why it mattered, whether the technology was ready, and who would pay for it. I enjoyed the building too. But I kept noticing that what really got me going was the thinking around the business itself. The market sizing. The competitive dynamics. Whether this particular AI approach had a real edge or was just riding the hype cycle, these were the kinds of questions that increasingly drew me towards venture capital investing. 

That realization did not come as a single dramatic moment. It built up slowly. I would read about new AI companies and find myself evaluating them before I even realized I was doing it. Is the model defensible? Is the data moat real? Can this team actually ship? My background in ML meant I could look past the buzzwords and understand what was technically feasible. My time at Amex has taught me what it looks like when machine learning actually works in production at scale. And building Darpan Labs had given me a taste of the founder side. All of it started pointing in the same direction.

I started exploring venture capital seriously in my second year. I spoke to people in the industry. I read investment memos. I tried to understand how the best firms think about software and AI. When I came across Z47, formerly Matrix Partners India, their thesis on software and AI investing felt like it matched what I had been gravitating toward on my own. They were not just looking at AI as a buzzword. They were looking at it with the depth and rigor that I had come to appreciate from my own technical background. I applied, went through the process, and got the offer to join their Software and AI investing team.

Looking back, the path makes sense in hindsight. But it did not feel that way when I was in it. I remember sitting in my room in MSH during the second year, wondering if I was making a mistake by not joining Citi full-time. Everyone around me had clear plans. Consulting. Banking. Product management. Telling people I wanted to do VC felt risky because the seats are few and the recruitment process is unpredictable. There were moments of real doubt.

But here is what I have come to believe. The best career decisions are not the ones that look safest on a spreadsheet. They are the ones where you pay attention to what actually excites you. For me, that turned out to be sitting at the intersection of technology and investing. Asking whether a piece of software can become a real business. Helping founders think through their strategy. Using the technical depth I have built over the years to make better investment calls.

I did not plan this. If you had told me during my JEE prep in Kendriya Vidyalaya that I would end up in venture capital, I would not have known what that meant. If you had told me during my metallurgy labs at IIT KGP, I would have laughed. Even when I walked into IIMA on day one, this was not on my radar. But every step- studying engineering, learning ML, building models at Amex, coming to IIMA, building Darpan Labs- added something that eventually made this path feel right.

The theme of this issue is Careers Unscripted, and I think that phrase captures it well. You can prepare and plan all you want. But sometimes the most important thing is to stay open to the possibility that the best version of your career is one you have not thought of yet.

Author Bio: 

Aniket Niranjan Mishra is a PGP 2026 graduate of IIM Ahmedabad. He holds a dual degree (B.Tech and M.Tech) from IIT Kharagpur and has worked at American Express and Citi. 

He is joining Z47 (formerly Matrix Partners India) on their Software and AI investing team. He may be contacted at aniket@z47.com  or p24aniketm@iima.ac.in or Mobile: +91 74320 00337.