Kanumury began his career as a blast furnace foreman before spending a decade at IBM. Now he is backing Indian founders building B2B AI products for global markets
Radhesh Kanumury launched his career in the manufacturing sector rather than advisory or financial fields. He began as a foreman in a blast furnace department of a steelworks, before joining IBM where he worked for over a decade honing his skills in the field. His work experience with IBM culminated in managing the IBM India Accelerator Program, cooperating with various startups in the B2B technology sector, which led him to understand that the next crop of important companies will be those based on enterprise software rather than consumer applications.
What Suvan Ventures Is Backing
The firm Kanumury now leads as Managing Partner focuses exclusively on AI-first B2B SaaS startups with development teams in India building products for global markets. The thesis is deliberate and narrow. Rather than casting a wide net across sectors and stages, Suvan looks for founders solving meaningful enterprise problems with large addressable markets, clear competitive advantages, and the ambition to compete globally from day one.
What Makes a Founder Investable
Kanumury has rather an unorthodox approach to evaluating startups. Unlike others he pays greater attention to product trials and customer validation rather than to the numbers stated in the business plan. He also looks for such characteristics in the founders as coachability, resilience, and clearness of thought.
Why He Is Optimistic About India
Kanumury frames India’s current moment in enterprise AI as a once-in-a-generation opportunity. With one of the world’s largest software developer communities increasingly capable of building AI-native products, and a rapidly growing pool of AI talent, he believes Indian founders have the raw material to build category-defining global companies. His advice to those starting out is simple and consistent: build around a real customer problem with a large market, validate early, and let paying customers define what comes next.
