Raja Skogland

Questions? I am 1 DM away. 

Community builder at heart, hyper connector, fundraising/growth advisor, serial entrepreneur and investor in 100+ startups.

My team of experienced exited founders, investors, board members, investors and partners from reputable consulting companies and I have created step by step programs to help:

- Go From Idea To Investors 
- Go from post seed to Series A
- Fundraise & Scale
- Build personal brands and communities to attract talent, clients and investors
- Become a certified board member, build an exclusive and strong European network and land your next board position.

We also connect vetted founders, investors, leaders and board members to co-create together.

Interested in getting more info?

Send me a DM.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Founder

The ecosystem of experts, investors, and serial entrepreneurs supporting your growth,
taking you from 🌱 to 🌳 and then🌳 🌳 🌳 🌳

We help startups, scale-ups, and SMBs raise money and build profitable, scalable businesses.
We also invest in B2B Nordic companies that are post-revenue.

👉 www.thevisionaryvc.com to reach new heights.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Rohit Bafna

Founder at @888vc,  Early stage venture capital fund backing founders building and selling beyond borders. AI/ Deep Tech/ Manufacturing. Investing across US- India. $250-$500k Cheques. Pre Seed to Series A Investor. 

Founder at GRO8.Club (Global Accelerator & Investments platform). Invested in more than 50+ Startups. Helping Startups Go Global. B2B Tech, AI, Deep Tech, Sustainability investor. 

Reach out to me rohit@888vc.co

Founder & CEO

888vc is the Cross Border Accelerator VC. We are a Peer network of Investors across the globe. We do cross border investments. Until now we have invested directly or indirectly with more than 20+ startups. Helping Indian startups go global. 

ROHIT BAFNA

Harsh Goenka put a piggy bank on his desk with a sign: "Put ₹50 if you don't call me Harsh." 

That's how he changed workplace culture at RPG.

Most family business heirs demand respect through titles. Harsh demanded it through results.

He was just 24 years old when he became the Managing Director of CEAT in 1983. Fresh MBA from IMD Lausanne, walking into a tyre company his father had just acquired two years ago.

Five years later, at 31, his father handed him the chairmanship of the entire RPG Group.

But here's what made him different. The RPG empire wasn't built from scratch. 

Between 1981 and 1989, his father had acquired 11 companies including CEAT Limited, Dunlop, KEC, and Saregama India Ltd.. They were diverse, disconnected, and honestly a bit chaotic.

Harsh transformed them.

He broke the traditional family business model. Hired professional CEOs from outside the family to run major companies. 

Brought in global partnerships with The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, DuPont, Vodafone, and Fujitsu. Made the group technology-driven and people-first.

Today, RPG Group operates across 20 countries with over 30,000 employees and generates $5.2 billion in revenue.

The piggy bank collected a few hundred rupees before people got comfortable calling him Harsh. 

But that small act said everything about his leadership philosophy: happy people are creative people, and hierarchy kills innovation.

What's one outdated tradition in your workplace that needs to go?

888vc

I've been in rooms full of investors before. 

But yesterday in Bengaluru felt different.

We officially launched GRO8, 888vc's GTM-first accelerator and the energy in that room reminded me why I do this.

Packed house. Founders leaning in. Investors asking the hard questions. And a VC panel that didn't hold back.

We put Supria Dhanda, Sandeep Agarwal, and Joslin Jose on stage and asked them the questions founders actually lose sleep over:

No rehearsed answers. No surface-level advice. Just real, unfiltered investor thinking shared with a room full of people who needed to hear it.

That's exactly what GRO8 is built on, execution over theory, conversations over presentations.

This is Day 1. And it already set the bar high.

A massive thank you to our partners who helped make this evening possible:

- Ecosystem Partners — HSR Founders Club & Wadhwani Foundation

- Legal Partner — Mantrika Legal

- Media Partner — StartupNews.fyi

Watch this space. 

GRO8 is just getting started. 🔥

Abhijit Chaudhary | Sagar Madhani | Ponnada Manoj | Santosh Patil | Jithendra Buravalli | Aravind Chandrasekaran | Manish Goyal | Sridhar Sampathirao | Hema Gollamudi | Pallavi C. | Kanishka Bajpai

If you're still pitching to investors who ghost you, you're in the wrong room.

The right room looks like this.

Investors who have written real checks, built real companies, and don't waste your time with vague feedback. This is the GRO8 Accelerator Program Launch Party.

We will be joined by: 
Supria Dhanda — Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Wyser. Knows exactly what a scalable founding team looks like before the numbers prove it.

Sandeep Agarwal — Founder & CEO, SutraNova Ventures. He's been where you are and has always backed founders who reminded him of that.

Karthik Prabhakar — Managing Partner, PeerCapital. The kind of investor who supports you before the rest of the room catches on.

But investors alone don't build companies. Execution does.

That's why we're also bringing in 6 of the sharpest GTM and growth minds in the room —
Aravind Chandrasekaran, Jithendra Buravalli, Manish Goyal, Sridhar Sampathirao, Hema Gollamudi, and Pallavi C. & Kanishka Bajpai  

People who've actually taken products to market, cracked distribution, and scaled revenue — not just advised on it.

I'll be there too, making sure every founder walks out with some life-changing advices.

So join us in the room where introductions turn into term sheets.
📅 25th February 2026 
⏰ 5 PM – 8 PM 
📍 Bengaluru 
🎟 Invite Only

DM me or check the comments for the registration link.

Only 5 days left to be a part of the GRO8 Accelerator Cohort — don’t miss this opportunity! Please check the comments below to apply for the cohort.

#GRO8 #888vc #BengaluruStartups #AcceleratorProgram #StartupIndia #VentureCapital #FounderCommunity

---

Team: Mansi Bhandari | Leelesh Gholkar | Aditya Naik | Palakk Devpurra

Partners: HSR Founders Club, Mantrika Legal, Wadhwani Foundation, Startup News

Indian businesses registered 18,486 new companies in Dubai in 2025 alone. 

And most VCs are still debating whether the India-UAE corridor is 'ready.'

It's not emerging. It's already here.

I've been investing across India, US, and UAE for years. And the most consistent pattern I've seen? The founders move first. The capital follows usually late.

Right now, founders are voting with their feet.

 1. Zero income tax. 
 2. 4-hour flights from most Indian metros. 
 3. A 3.5 million-strong Indian diaspora that doubles as a ready-made customer base. 
 4. And a government that's actively pulling Indian startups in the UAE-India CEPA Startup Series alone drew 10,000 applications for 5 spots.

At 888vc, this is exactly the corridor we've been backing because the fundamentals have been building quietly for years while the room was looking elsewhere.

The founders already know. The question is whether investors catch up before the window tightens.

Are you building or investing in the India-UAE corridor?

What an amazing experience!

Attended Capital Connect by TiE for the first time. Thanks to TiE Delhi-NCR, Amit Verma, Upasana Sharma, Geetika Dayal for bringing us together.

It was great connecting with you all, exchanging ideas in a setting where conversations flow far more meaningfully than at large-scale conferences.

Beautiful property, excellent hospitality, and relationship building topped with fun and singing - "sone pe suhaga," thanks Vikram Gupta sir!

Looking forward to the next one.
888vc & GRO8 Club

GRO8 Investor Mentor Mixer – Gurugram Edition happened and…

The room was alive.

With Investors & mentors, all in one space, and the energy never dipped. 

There are conversations you can't manufacture, only create the conditions for.

That's what we tried to do. And on the 11th, it showed up.

We’re walking away grateful for every person who showed up with intention, and for what this community is becoming.

Thank you!

888vc

"If Scorpio had flopped, the board would have fired me." 

Anand Mahindra on the gamble that defined his leadership.

In 1997, Anand Mahindra had just become Managing Director of Mahindra  & Mahindra.

The company was known for tractors and utility vehicles.

His vision: build India’s first globally competitive SUV.

The challenge?
₹600 crore at stake.
A 120-member engineering team, with an average age of 27.
No prior experience building a vehicle from scratch.

In 2002, Mahindra launched the Scorpio at ₹5.5 lakh.

It became a commercial success, won awards, and repositioned Mahindra in the passenger vehicle market.

More importantly, it changed how SUVs were perceived in India, shifting them from functional machines to aspirational products.

Leadership is often defined by calculated risk taken at the right time.

The question is whether conviction justifies it.

What’s a decision that shaped your trajectory?

888vc

I remember when investors would ask me, "Why India for deep tech? They don't even make chips."

I didn't have a great answer then. 

Last Saturday, I finally did.

Micron Technology just inaugurated its ATMP facility in Sanand, Gujarat and shipped India's first DRAM memory module straight to Dell.

It's a 500,000 sq ft clean room, the largest single raised-floor semiconductor clean room anywhere in the world. Engineered specifically for Gujarat's soil and climate. Running air filtration at 120 cycles per hour. Handling gold bonding wires thinner than a fraction of a human hair.

This is precision manufacturing at a scale India has never seen before.

I've spent years backing founders who believed India could compete at the deep tech frontier.

The skeptics asked for proof.

Sanand just became the answer.

📌 What sector do you think India should double down on next in deep tech?

#DeepTech #Semiconductors #India #VentureCapital #888vc #CrossBorderInvestments #IndiaManufacturing | 888vc

When Adi Godrej joined Godrej Group in 1963, it was a loss-making company. Within a year, he turned it profitable.

He had a fresh MBA from MIT Sloan and the family business was waiting.

But there was a problem:

The 66-year-old company was stuck in pre-independence management practices. 

Adi didn't just join. He rewrote the rulebook.

He applied process improvements from MIT. Modernized operations. Systemized what was chaos.

Then came the boldest move:

He broke the family hegemony.

 • Hired professional CEOs from outside the family. 
 • Recruited from IIMs when they were barely 3 years old. 
 • Made the business professional, not personal.

Then in 1991, liberalization hit and most Indian companies panicked.

Adi partnered with Procter & Gamble and GE. He learned, adapted and competed.

This resulted in 17% CAGR for 50 years. 

The real lesson for founders here is that legacy businesses don't fail because they're old. They fail because they refuse to evolve.

Adi proved that with the right systems, even a century-old family business can beat global giants.

What's one legacy system in your business that needs to change?

888vc

Uday Kotak had job offers from Hindustan Unilever (HUL) and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) but turned them both down to start a bill discounting business from a 300 sq ft office.

In 1982, he had a fresh MBA from Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies (JBIMS) and the offers were tempting.

But Uday saw something others didn't: India's financial sector was broken, controlled, and ripe for disruption.

So he borrowed ₹30 lakh from family and friends and started Kotak Capital Management Finance Ltd.

His first deal was helping a Tata company raise funds at 12% when banks charged 17%.

He made 5% on the spread. 

But here's the move that changed everything:

He called his friend Anand Mahindra and said: "Let's put our names on this company. Like J.P. Morgan. Like Goldman Sachs."

Anand invested ₹4 lakh. The company became Kotak Mahindra Finance.

Fast forward to 2003:

Kotak Mahindra Bank became the first NBFC in India to get a banking license from RBI.

Today? ₹6.2 lakh crore in assets. India's third-largest private bank.

The lesson for founders:

The best opportunities aren't always in established sectors. Sometimes they're in the broken systems everyone else ignores.

What's one broken system you're betting on?

888vc

I block 2 hours every week where I do absolutely nothing related to deals.

Just walking, reading, or sitting with one question:
"What am I missing?"

Sounds counterproductive? That's what I thought too, until I realised something after investing in 50+ startups across India, the US, andthe UAE:

👉 My worst investment decisions came from being "too busy" to think.

The deal that looked perfect on paper but had a capital structure red flag, I didn't pause to question. The founder, whose energy was contagious but whose unit economics didn't add up.

Speed killed my judgment. Not a lack of information.

The VC world glorifies hustle. Back-to-back meetings. 200 decks a week. "Always be deploying."

But the most productive thing an investor can do is stop. 

Think. Connect dots that a packed calendar won't let you see.

Warren Edward Buffett reads 5-6 hours a day.
Charlie Munger called it "sit on your investing."

The best returns come from thinking better.

What's one unconventional productivity habit that's changed how you work?

888vc

The investment that taught me the most never actually made me a single rupee.

Here's what happened:

Early in my investing career, I met a founder who could make any room believe.

I made my decision in the first meeting. Term sheet followed days later.

I hadn't spoken to a single customer.
Hadn't stress-tested the unit economics.
Hadn't asked the one question every investor should ask before writing a cheque:

Is the market ready for this or just the founder?

The startup didn't collapse dramatically but it just slowly ran out of road.

The market wasn't where the founder thought it was and I was so caught up in the person across the table that I never stopped to verify whether the ground beneath the vision was real.

That experience rewired how I invest.

Today, the more excited I am about a founder, the slower I move.

Excitement is data but it's not diligence.

The best founders can make you feel certainty where only probability exists. That's their gift and your trap.

I check now before conviction turns into a cheque:

 1. Are customers pulling the product or is the founder pushing a narrative?
 2. Does the market timing actually match the roadmap
 3. What breaks this if the founder is wrong about one core assumption?

The founders who make you move fast are often the ones who deserve your slowest thinking.

What's the most expensive lesson your investment career has handed you?

888vc

Do you know that 60% of cross-border deals fail because two sides never actually understood each other?

I've seen this play out repeatedly in the India-UAE corridor and the blindspot is almost always the same:

In India, a great meeting builds momentum. Energy in the room means things are moving. A follow-up WhatsApp the next morning feels natural. Pushing for a quick decision signals conviction.

In the UAE, that same behaviour reads very differently.

Emirati and Gulf investors operate on trust that is built slowly, deliberately, and almost entirely outside the formal meeting room. The business card exchange, the majlis conversation, the invitation to a meal are the deal. The boardroom is just where paperwork gets signed.

I've watched Indian founders mistake a warm meeting for a green light, then wonder why the deal went cold over the next three weeks. 

Your pitch deck opens the door and your patience keeps you in the room.

At 888vc, cross-border is something we navigate deal by deal, room by room. The cultural context is as important as the cap table.

If you're an Indian founder eyeing the UAE, slow down to speed up.

What's the biggest cultural miscalculation you've seen in a cross-border deal?

Free got India hooked on AI.
Now the real game begins.

Can they pay for it?

India is now the world's largest market for GenAI app downloads.

207% year-over-year growth. 
20% of the global AI user base. 

ChatGPT crossing 100 million weekly active users here alone.

Impressive numbers but here's the one that tells the real story:

India accounts for just 1% of global AI in-app revenue.

Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai, Dario Amodei flew to New Delhi last week because they know what that 1% actually means:

The monetization battle for the world's most downloaded AI market hasn't even started yet.

OpenAI, Google, Perplexity didn't offer free premium access out of generosity. They were buying something far more valuable than revenue:

✅ Habit.

And it worked. India got hooked.

Now the free windows are closing. Perplexity ended its Airtel bundle. ChatGPT Go's free tier is gone. The promotional era is over.

What comes next is the real test.

I've watched this exact playbook before when UPI went free to wire payment behavior into 400 million Indians. Nobody paid for UPI. But the ecosystem that monetized on top of it? Worth billions.

AI in India is on the same curve.

The founders I'm most excited about aren't trying to out-ChatGPT ChatGPT. 

They're building what comes next AI tools that solve problems at Indian scale, with Indian context, for a user base that's now been trained to rely on AI every single day.

That's not a small opportunity. That's a category.

If you're building an AI product for India, what's your honest take on monetization? Are Indian users ready to pay?

#AIIndia #VentureCapital #IndiaStartups #GenerativeAI #CrossBorderInvestments #888vc #StartupStrategy

888vc

This barber owns a Rolls Royce and still cuts hair every weekend.

Ramesh Babu was seven years old when his father died. His father left behind a small barbershop on Brigade Road in Bangalore and a family with no savings. His mother couldn't run the shop, so she rented it out for just five rupees a day.

That's when Ramesh started doing odd jobs. At thirteen, he was delivering newspapers and milk bottles before school. Some days, his family survived on one meal. Some days, they went hungry.

After finishing tenth standard, Ramesh had a choice to make. He decided to take back the barbershop from his uncle and run it himself. 

The shop was called Inner Space, and it quickly became popular with students from the nearby school. He was making decent money as a barber, around ten to twenty thousand rupees a month.

In 1993, he bought a used Maruti Omni van. The EMI was six thousand eight hundred rupees and he was struggling to pay it. Then Nandini Akka, a woman whose house his mother worked at, gave him an idea. 

She worked at Intel and asked him a simple question: "Why don't you rent out your van when you're not using it?"

That question changed everything.

His first rental contract came from Intel through Nandini's connection. The income from renting the van was better than he expected. 

By 2004, he had seven cars in his fleet and decided to take a massive risk. Everyone told him he was making a huge mistake when he bought his first luxury car, a Mercedes E-Class, for forty lakh rupees. 

But Ramesh saw something others didn't. Nobody else in Bangalore was renting out brand new luxury cars.

The risk paid off. Bollywood stars like Amitabh Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai, and Aamir Khan started using his service. Politicians came calling when they visited Bangalore.

In 2011, he bought a Rolls Royce Ghost for three crore rupees. He almost went bankrupt. He even mortgaged his wife's jewelry. 

People told him to sell the car. He refused. Eighteen months later, he bounced back.

Today, Ramesh Tours & Travels Private Limited has over four hundred vehicles. His fleet includes a Mercedes Maybach, BMWs, Jaguars, Audis, and that Rolls Royce Ghost which he rents out for seventy-five thousand rupees a day.

But here's what makes his story different. 

Every weekend, you'll still find Ramesh Babu at Inner Space giving haircuts. He charges sixty-five rupees for his regular customers. He says he'll keep cutting hair as long as his hands are healthy.

Most people who make it big forget where they came from. Ramesh never did.

What's stopping you from taking that one risk that could change everything?

In 2017, Indra Nooyi sent 400+ letters to her employees' parents.

When she became CEO of PepsiCo, Nooyi visited India to see her mother.

A stream of visitors arrived. 
They congratulated her mother. 
Praised her upbringing. 
Celebrated the daughter who had made it.

But barely a word to Indra herself.

That moment hit her.

Behind every high-performing executive was a parent who sacrificed, guided, and believed long before any board room did.

So she did something radical:

She wrote to the parents of her senior leaders, thanking them for the gift of their child to PepsiCo.

The response was overwhelming.

My take as an investor on this who's backed 50+ startups is that the best leaders I've seen understand one thing deeply:

People don't just show up to work. They show up carrying their entire story.

And when you acknowledge that story, something shifts.

Most founders obsess over TAM, unit economics, and fundraising decks.

The ones who actually scale obsess over people because at the end of the day capital follows culture, not the other way around.

Who's the leader in your life that made you feel truly seen?

#Leadership #StartupCulture #VentureCapital #888vc #FounderMindset #PeopleFirst | 888vc

On 11th March, we're hosting the GRO8 Investor Mentor Mixer – Gurugram Edition — a curated, paid gathering by 888vc for people who are serious about building, funding, and scaling.

The room will have:
▪️ Active investors with capital to deploy
▪️ Founders with real traction, not just decks
▪️ Mentors and operators who've done it before

This networking event will make high-signal connects and real capital conversations. 

I can assure you. 

We're keeping the room deliberately small so the best deals can with the right people.

📅 11th March 2026
⏰ 5:30 PM – 8:00 PM
📍 Gurugram

Seats are limited and paid — which means everyone in the room chose to be there.

If you're a founder ready to have real conversations with investors, or an investor looking to meet high-conviction founders — this is your room.

Registeration link attached in first comment. 

See you there.

#888VC #GRO8 #StartupIndia #VentureCapital #AngelInvesting #Gurugram #StartupEcosystem #InvestorMixer #Founders #EarlyStageInvesting

Every colour in Holi has a lesson for founders.

But the one that stays with me is this:

The colour doesn't care who you are when it lands on you.

That's the kind of ecosystem I want to build where the best idea wins, not the loudest room.

Wishing everyone a Happy Holi. 

May this year bring bold bets and better outcomes. 🎨

888vc #Holi

Mark Zuckerberg wears the same grey t-shirt every single day on purpose because he has a theory about decision fatigue.

Zuckerberg owns multiple identical grey t-shirts. Every morning, he picks one and puts it on. No thinking required.

When people asked him why, he explained: "I want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community."

He's running a company used by billions of people. Every day, he makes decisions about features, acquisitions, policies, and products that affect the entire world. Each decision requires mental energy.

So he eliminated the smallest decisions. 

What to wear. 
What to eat for breakfast. 
What color socks to put on.

Steve Jobs did the same thing with his black turtlenecks. 
Barack Obama wore only grey or blue suits as President. 

They all understood something most people miss: your brain has a limited amount of decision-making capacity each day.

Every small decision you make depletes that capacity. By the time you get to the important decisions, you're running on fumes.

Zuckerberg decided to save his mental energy for the decisions that actually matter. 

What small decisions are you wasting mental energy on that don't actually matter?

888vc

With 40 videos and zero users, these 3 founders questioned everything.
18 months later, Google bought it for $1.65B.

The platform I am talking about is YouTube.

Most people forget that YouTube started as a dating site.

The idea was simple: 

upload a video of yourself, 
let people discover you. 

But no one cared. 

The founders pivoted to general video sharing and even then, the platform sat quiet. Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim were, by their own admission, depressed.

This is the part no one talks about when they tell the YouTube story.

They uploaded content themselves to seed the platform. They distributed videos across MySpace, which was the viral engine of that era. 

And slowly, one video caught fire. Then another. Then the flywheel started turning.

By the time Google acquired them, the outcome felt obvious. But in the building phase, even the founders weren't sure it would work.

I think about this often when I'm evaluating early-stage platforms and marketplaces.

The hardest problem is the cold start and getting enough momentum that the thing feels alive before it actually is.

The founders who survive that window aren't always the ones with the best decks or the cleanest unit economics. They're the ones who stay scrappy long enough for the flywheel to catch.

What's the hardest "cold start" moment you've seen a founder push through?

888vc

taplio

The Battle

Raja Skogland

ROHIT BAFNA

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreROHIT BAFNA's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Raja Skogland

ROHIT BAFNA

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}ROHIT BAFNA's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreROHIT BAFNA's LinkedIn Performance