About Us

We make the business work first, then help it get funded.

Who we are

Avan Partners is a venture diagnostics firm for early-stage Indian D2C founders. In plain terms, we look at your business the way an investor will, then help you fix what they would find.

We started Avan because good founders kept reaching investor meetings with a story their numbers couldn't hold up, and finding out in the meeting. Nothing was wrong with their ambition. Nobody had checked the business before the investor did.

Every review we do looks forward as well as back. Projections, valuation, upside and downside, for the company, the founder and the category. What founders pay for, and what investors act on, is our read of where a company is going.

Meet the partners

The partners

Vannan Mehta

Co-founder

Vannan works on whether a business holds up. He starts with the assumption in a founder's model that felt too obvious to test. At Avan he finds it first, testing unit economics, cash flow, valuation and downside against the projections, so founders walk into a raise already knowing where their numbers bend and why they hold. He studied Business and Management at LSE and started a streetwear label at fifteen, selling its first run himself. He went on to become a Partner at a capital advisory firm, working on raises across the UK, Europe, LATAM and the US, and built its research and outreach systems from scratch.

Vannan on LinkedIn

Ananya Iyer

Founder

Ananya trained as a filmmaker and an actor, then started reading company filings by choice. A brand can lose an investor before the numbers come up, when the story and the business say different things. At Avan she closes that gap, shaping how a company reads to the outside world, from the brand and the founder to the market and the people in it, so that what a founder says and what the numbers show are the same argument. She spent close to a decade in film production, content and curriculum design, and grew a YouTube channel past 7.5 million views in under eight months without spending a rupee on ads. She then joined an equity research firm as an analyst, became Chief Research Officer within two months, and wrote 16 reports on Indian markets.

Ananya on LinkedIn

How we learned finance

Vannan learned finance at LSE and then in live raises at a venture capital advisory firm. Ananya taught herself, report by report, until she was running a research desk. One of us brings the training, the other brings the habit of checking everything from first principles, and neither of us takes a number on trust. That's why we rebuild unit economics from raw data and score every review separately before comparing notes.

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What we turn down

What we refuse, and why.

The quickest way to know whether we align is to read what we won't do.

Advice on a business we haven't reviewed.Advice without numbers is a guess.
Introducing a company we haven't reviewed and scored.One bad referral costs more than three good ones earn.
Raising for a business that isn't ready, or acting as a fund.We build the business first, then raise. We don't invest our own money.
Promising a raise, a valuation, meetings or a close date.None of those are ours to give.
Founders with no skin in the game.The work only pays off if someone acts on it.
Uncertified supplements, or claims the label doesn't support.We can't check them, and we won't build the misleading part.
Taking a fee to delay a founder.If CAC is high, retention is low and nothing is going to change, we'll say what has to change instead.
Accounting, tax, legal drafting.We'll name a CA or a lawyer who does it well.
Running your operations, product or hiring.We'd lose the distance that lets us be blunt with you.

When we say no to a founder, we put the reason in writing. When we say no to sending a fund a deal, we tell them that too.

How we work

The rules we hold ourselves to.

Findings before fees.You see what we found before we discuss scope or money, and the written findings are yours either way.
A handful of engagements a year, never more than three at once.
Every investor is told, in the first message, whether a company paid us.
Nothing leaves us unless it's true, useful, earned, in the founder's interest, and something we'd defend to an investor, a lawyer or the next founder.
A note every Monday to every live client. We don't skip a week.

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