Bengaluru, 2016. The brief was clear. The potential investors were keen to meet the top five people working at a consumer tech startup, which was at the final stage of a sizeable funding. The pre-funding diligence was crucial for the largest and the oldest Singapore-based venture capital firm, which had rolled out its first fund of $12 million in 2012, and had backed early to growth-stage startups in India and Southeast Asia, and had counted mobile tech firm ZipDial as its maiden investment in India back in 2013. “We killed the regular process in 2015,” recalls Amit Anand, founding partner at Jungle Ventures, alluding to the ritual of entrepreneurs pitching to the investment committees (ICs) of the VC fund as the penultimate step before bagging the funding. “It was a completely wrong process,” reckons the VC, who had flown down to India along with his senior team to spend at least a day or so with the founders who had ticked all the boxes, and had to just clear one last hurdle before becoming part of the Jungle portfolio.