Parth Pangtey

I’m Parth Pangtey, Founder & CEO of FoundrFuse. My background is in finance, with an MBA in Finance from the US and prior experience in investment banking at Société Générale in Manhattan. Moving from evaluating businesses from the capital side to building companies myself fundamentally changed how I looked at the startup ecosystem.

When I started FoundrFuse, the initial thesis was straightforward: make it easier for founders and investors to discover and connect with one another. We built a technology-led platform around verified founder profiles, intelligent discovery, investor access and startup ecosystem connections.

But building the product exposed a deeper problem.

I realised that India does not only have a founder-to-investor access problem. It has a founder-readiness problem.

Giving a founder access to an investor is only useful if that founder is ready for the conversation. Many aspiring entrepreneurs still struggle with validating an idea, articulating the problem they are solving, understanding their market, preparing a credible pitch, identifying the right opportunities and knowing when they are actually ready to approach investors.

That insight changed how I started thinking about FoundrFuse.

The thesis evolved from simply improving discovery and connections to building a more structured journey around:

Founder Readiness → Opportunity Discovery → Ecosystem Access.

FoundrFuse has since built an ecosystem of 500+ founders, including a significant base of student and early-stage entrepreneurs across Delhi NCR and Punjab, alongside an emerging network of angel investors and startup ecosystem stakeholders.

The next part of the journey has taken us upstream into universities.

A large number of future founders first encounter entrepreneurship in college through E-Cells, competitions, workshops and speaker sessions. These initiatives are valuable, but there is often a gap between being interested in entrepreneurship and actually becoming capable of building a venture.

That led us to start developing the Founder Readiness Centre model with educational institutions: structured programmes where aspiring student entrepreneurs can work on venture readiness, idea development, pitch preparation, mentorship, startup ecosystem discovery and access to relevant opportunities.

The larger question I’m interested in solving is:

Can founder readiness be made structured and measurable enough that we improve not only how many people attempt entrepreneurship, but how prepared they are when they do?

One of my biggest lessons from building FoundrFuse has been that more features, more networking and more introductions do not automatically create better outcomes. The quality of the opportunity on the other side depends heavily on how prepared the founder is before the introduction happens.

That realisation continues to shape what we are building.

I also write regularly about startups, technology, AI and business, with more than 20 articles published across industry and technology publications. Writing has become another way for me to study emerging industries, challenge my own assumptions and articulate what I am learning while building.

Ultimately, I want FoundrFuse to help create a more structured pathway between someone saying “I want to build a startup” and becoming a founder genuinely ready to build one.