He Raised $300M+, Expanded Into 30+ Countries, And Took His Company Public By Powering Cloud-Based Customer Loyalty Solutions For Global Enterprise Brands
Aneesh Reddy belongs to that rare category of founders who have built their companies for nearly two decades through multiple cycles, reinvented their businesses through crises, expanded across continents, and still managed to retain over 100 employees who have stayed for more than 10 years.
As the co-founder and CEO of Capillary Technologies, Aneesh has scaled the company from a $30K campus seed loan to serving two Fortune 10 companies, 19 Fortune 500 companies, and powering over a trillion dollars in commerce annually.
Capillary is now a global loyalty and customer engagement leader that has raised more than $100M in equity, over $200M in secondary, and successfully executed a $100M IPO that was oversubscribed 52x. Capillary also navigated the challenges posed by the global pandemic proficiently.
Aneesh’s story impresses with its perseverance, customer obsession, international expansion, crisis pivots, and, uniquely, the founding of mental healthcare. This is the journey behind Capillary.
Growing Up in Hyderabad: The Early Spark
Aneesh grew up in Hyderabad, the emerging IT capital of southern India. Both of his parents were doctors, a classic backdrop to the familiar “doctor or engineer” career expectation many Indian children grow up with.
In Aneesh’s case, engineering won out not because of cultural pressure, but because of honest self-awareness and a proficiency in math and physics. As his father put it: “You need a lot of patience to be a doctor.” Aneesh needed speed, challenge, and the thrill of solving things.
That led him to IIT Kharagpur. Here, Aneesh’s curiosity deepened, and his entrepreneurial instincts surfaced. He built robotics projects, ran the robotics club, and in 2005 co-founded the Entrepreneurship Cell, years before startup culture became mainstream in India.
Aneesh recalls how challenging it was to procure the equipment needed to build, including motors, ICs, and other components. His solution? To build a company that would create robotic hobby kits. However, he didn’t know how to build a company. So, the next solution was to establish the cell.
The Entrepreneurship Cell planted the seed: solving real problems through software was the career he wanted.
Leaving Corporate Life to Chase Purpose
After graduating in 2006, Aneesh joined the cigarettes-to-FMCG superbrands-to-hotels conglomerate ITC, one of India’s top five public companies. The job was prestigious, fast-moving, and well-paid. He advanced quickly, moving up two roles in two years. But he also felt a creeping internal question:
“What am I really adding here? What is my purpose? Which cog am I in this massive wheel?” Because his parents were financially independent, Aneesh didn’t need to send money home. This gave him the freedom and psychological cushion to explore entrepreneurship.
By early 2008, Aneesh knew he had to try. He teamed up with Krishna Mehra, a friend from IIT. They took a small ₹1 5 lakh (approximately $30K) seed loan from IIT, which gave the institute a 4% equity stake. And they set out with a simple thesis.
Find two booming sectors and build in the intersection. The duo chose retail and mobile, both of which were surging in India in 2008. At the time, the country had just opened to international brands such as Walmart, Levi’s, and others.
Aneesh and Krishna set out to meet everyone in their networks who was operating in the retail and mobile spaces. They offered to build good software to solve their problems. Their strategy? Don’t write a single line of code until someone is willing to pay for it.
Then Lehman Brothers collapsed one month later on September 11, 2008.
Finding Product-Market Fit in a Crisis
In the aftermath of the global recession, retailers suddenly faced a painful truth: same-store sales were collapsing. Aneesh and Krishna spent months visiting retail and mobile executives, asking a single question: “What is your biggest problem right now?”
Every answer pointed to the same friction: Physical loyalty programs were outdated, slow, and unusable. Only 5% of customers bothered to fill out long forms. Retailers had no visibility into who their customers were or how to bring them back. The duo would ask, "Who are your customers?"
Aneesh and Krishna introduced a simple, elegant idea: Use the customer’s mobile number as the universal identifier. No forms. No cards. Just tell the cashier your number. Sign-ups jumped from 5% to 80%, instantly demonstrating value. Removing the friction created a bigger option curve.
The cofounders coupled that with an early, bold SaaS model. They charged $50 per store per month at a time when India’s SaaS ecosystem didn’t yet exist. Retailers could try the product for three months before rolling it out across their footprint.
The friction was gone, the ROI was obvious, and the recession became an unexpected tailwind. As Aneesh recalls, their foray into the retail loyalty space was accidental. Customers hesitated to buy the big license software and were reluctant to invest in servers.
Aneesh and Krishna simply offered to host it on the cloud for a $50 fee. The culture was to listen to customers and keep reiterating. This philosophy has helped Capillary time and time again. By 2011, the company was powering loyalty programs across 5,000 stores in India.
The Capillary Business Model
Explaining the Capillary business model, Aneesh reveals that they serve large enterprises, working with two of the Fortune 10 and 19 of the Fortune 500 companies. Essentially, Capillary is a software-as-a-service platform that leverages AI to drive loyalty programs for large enterprises.
The company’s customer profile includes retailers, healthcare companies, car rental companies, airlines, banks, and telcos. The underlying principle is customer retention. Think subscription points, memberships, promotions, coupons, and others for huge enterprises.
Capillary operates in the cloud and today has around a billion consumers on its platform across the various brands it works with. The company handles around a trillion dollars of commerce annually.
Customers are charged an annual, recurring subscription fee, similar to SaaS, tied to the number of transactions or customers on the platform.
Aneesh underscores two execution strategies that have worked well for Capillary. He considers them crucial lessons that aspiring entrepreneurs can leverage.
They pivoted to unlock new verticals, serving more customers and a wider range of customer profiles. · They developed playbooks to expand beyond India and launch into other countries. Their first stop was Singapore, before moving on to more developed countries, such as the US.
Scaling Across Geographies: The “Low-Risk Pilot” Playbook
As Aneesh recalls, when they started Capillary in 2008, they made great strides in the first three to four years because they had solved a critical problem for retailers.
In addition to 5,000 stores in India, Capillary soon began working with leading brands, including Puma, Pizza Hut, and other conglomerates. However, global expansion for enterprise SaaS is notoriously difficult due to risk perceptions among large companies, despite the best software.
Capillary solved this through a simple but brilliant lever. It used existing customers to bring them into new countries. Puma took them to Southeast Asia. Pizza Hut took them to the Middle East.
And the pitch everywhere was the same: “Try a $50-per-store pilot for three months. If you see 4% to 5% revenue uplift, scale it.”
It was the perfect “small affordable loss, massive upside” framing. Once they had a couple of large marquee brands in each market, risk perception dropped, and sales accelerated.
By the mid-2010s, Capillary had crossed $30M in revenue across India, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Aneesh and Krishna began considering expansion into small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and offering additional products. But the biggest test was still coming.
COVID: The Pivot That Defined the Company
COVID nearly broke Capillary. In 2020, the company had just turned profitable and, for the first time, hadn’t raised funding, relying on its cash flows to remain operational. However, it was a retail tech platform. Retail stores unexpectedly shut down across Asia.
Governments weren’t offering the kinds of relief packages seen in the US or Europe. For a company deeply tied to retail, the risk was existential. Aneesh and his team had to make the hardest decisions of their careers. Capillary shut down its SMB mid-market business and focused on large enterprises.
Next, Aneesh and Krishna shut down all non-core products, keeping only the loyalty programs. They cut costs by 65%, focusing on the one thing they were especially good at. They also started pivoting toward the West and into newer verticals.
As Aneesh points out, at the time, retail represented nearly the entire business. Today, retail accounts for only 25% of revenue, and Asia is only 25% of the market. Furthermore, SMBs generate less than 3% of revenue. The transformation was radical. From the depths of COVID, Capillary has grown 5x.
The Founder’s Mind: Anxiety, Cycles, and Vipassana
One of the most striking parts of Aneesh’s story is his candor about founder psychology and mental health. During the first COVID-19 downturn, he began prioritizing mental health and highlighted its critical importance across his organization.
After 17 years of building, Aneesh felt overwhelmed by mistakes, customer churn, close calls with cash, key employees leaving, and perpetual uncertainty. He faced situations when the self-criticism would become overpowering.
Aneesh describes the founder mind as either your greatest asset or your greatest enemy. In 2018–19, he reached a breaking point. A friend suggested he attend a Vipassana retreat. Ten days of silence. No devices. No talking. Just breathing and awareness. He came out feeling 15 years younger.
The negative loops were gone, and 85% to 90% of the mental clutter dissolved. For the first time in years, Aneesh felt light, energized, and clear. He realized that taking care of your mind is crucial for founders, given the ambiguity, anxiety, feelings of helplessness, and chaos they live with.
Aneesh made the 10-day Vipassana retreat an annual practice and institutionalized it inside Capillary.
The company now runs a program called Life Beyond Numbers, with 10-day retreats available to any employee. Shorter inner-peace retreats, meditation sessions, sports programs, and wellness investments are also options.
Today, more than 100 out of 700 employees have been with Capillary for 10+ years. They have made money and done well for themselves. Beyond ESOPs, they have grown and lead happy lives. But a culture like that does not happen by accident.
Financing: $100M Equity and $200M Secondary
Talking about their financing cycles, Aneesh reveals that they’ve raised $100M in equity and $200M in secondaries. Then came the $100M IPO and another round of secondaries. Investors like Sequoia, Norwest, Warburg Pincus, Avataar, Filter, American Express, and Qualcomm backed the company.
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Aneesh is unusually disciplined about fundraising. Instead of running frantic fundraising campaigns, he maintained a simple habit for over a decade: meeting 1 or 2 investors every week. Always. Whether fundraising or not.
This strategy kept relationships warm, feedback flowing, and investor trust building consistently. Interacting with investors and answering their questions kept Aneesh grounded. He would constantly review whether he was building the business correctly or missing anything crucial.
When Capillary did raise, rounds closed in 2 to 3 months without bankers. Aneesh and his team would simply reach out to the five or six people from the cohort with whom he had been in touch over the last few years.
When Sequoia Capital and Norwest Venture Partners came together for the Series A funding round, it signaled they wanted a larger allocation, creating space for a secondary. Aneesh is clear about his principle: Founders who never take secondary early tend to sell too soon.
Early liquidity gave the team the confidence to play a long game, 17 years and counting. This strategy gave founders staying power and employees financial stability. It enabled Aneesh and his team to cycle out older funds, bring in fresh capital, and reset the investor lifecycle so no one became stale.
As Aneesh underscores, he believes in being one step ahead in creating secondary projects and opportunities for existing investors, employees, and even the founders themselves.
The 52x Oversubscribed IPO
When Capillary finally went public, the timing was precise. It had EBITDA margins above 10%, 30% to 40% growth, and strong cash generation. The company also had a global customer base and clear signals of enterprise trust.
The IPO was oversubscribed 52x, with six of India’s eight largest funds participating. The stock is trading at 20% above the listing price, and the company now operates with the transparency and credibility that global enterprises prefer.
Aneesh’s Vision: A Happier, Less Anxious World
When asked what the world would look like if his company’s mission were fully realized, Aneesh did not discuss revenue, scale, or enterprise penetration. He spoke about people and a world where individuals are less anxious, less greedy, and less fearful.
Aneesh foresees a balanced world, what he describes as a “Buddhist middle path,” where founders are not crushed by cycles, pressure, and self-criticism. His vision is deeply human, with people taking more care of themselves, especially from a mental health perspective.
Advice to Founders: A 20-Year Playbook
Aneesh’s guidance for entrepreneurs is grounded in both scars and successes:
Always listen to customers. Every time he built based on intuition instead of real pain, it failed. Pick a problem, find the tech, and solve it. Loyalty was the pain. SaaS was the solution. Building without talking to customers will get you nowhere, Aneesh says. · Expect a 20-year journey. Real companies take decades. Capillary will likely be a 30-year journey before it outlives him. · Protect your mind. Founders think success comes at the expense of family, friends, health, and sanity. Aneesh believes the opposite. A well-balanced life sharpens judgment and prolongs endurance. Focus on strong family bonds and a great friend circle.
Conclusion
Aneesh Reddy’s journey is one of the most compelling founder stories in India’s technology ecosystem. It is a story of building slow, building right, and building with clarity of purpose.
Aneesh scaled a company through the global financial crisis, COVID-19, international expansion, and multiple reinventions, culminating in a wildly successful IPO. But his greatest lesson is not about SaaS, fundraising, or scale. It is about the founder’s mind.
In a world obsessed with growth at any cost, Aneesh built something remarkably different: long-term, resilient, and deeply human.
Aneesh scaled Capillary from a $30K campus loan to a global enterprise platform powering over a trillion dollars in commerce. · Capillary’s breakthrough came from solving real retail pain points with a frictionless mobile-based loyalty system. · International expansion succeeded through a “low-risk pilot” playbook and customer-led entry into new markets. · COVID forced Capillary to reinvent itself, shut non-core products, pivot to the West, and ultimately grow 5x. · Aneesh institutionalized mental health through Vipassana and company-wide wellbeing programs, driving extraordinary team retention. · His disciplined fundraising rhythm—meeting investors weekly—enabled $100M equity, $200M secondary, and a 52x oversubscribed IPO. · Aneesh’s core philosophy: listen to customers, build for decades, and protect your mind because clarity compounds more than capital.
Original Version
Alejandro Cremades: Alrighty, hello everyone and welcome to the DealMaker Show. So today we have an amazing amazing founder, amazing leader. you know I think that what he has been able to accomplish is really remarkable with his company.
Alejandro Cremades: For so long, too. and And also the team that he's been able to build around him. I mean, think about this. Over 100 employees that have been with the company for over 10 years. I mean, that's absolutely remarkable. On today's say show, we're going be covering all the good stuff that we like to hear. The building, the scaling, the financing, but then also taking the company public. ah We're going to be talking about two secondaries, how they work, you know, why they make sense.
Alejandro Cremades: Why not? And then also COVID, how to think about pivoting your business, adjusting. i mean, they've been at it for a long time with the business. So the business has really matured and transformed itself several times. And i think that you are all going to find that super, super inspiring. So again, brace yourself for an amazing conversation ahead of us.
Alejandro Cremades: And without further ado, let's welcome our guest today. Anish, ready? Welcome up to the show.
Aneesh Reddy: Thanks Alejandro for having me today. Looking forward to the chat today.
Alejandro Cremades: So born in Hyderabad and they grew up there in India. So give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up for you, Anish?
Aneesh Reddy: You know, Hedrubath is this IT city in the south of India. Both my parents and doctors, you know, lovely fun upbringing.
Aneesh Reddy: You know, went to IIT for my undergrad. That was, you know, went to IIT Kharapur. And that was a time when I thought I really grew as an individual, those four years in college and campus.
Aneesh Reddy: and then went and joined this Cigarettes to Hotels Conglomerate ITC. It's a top five public company in India.
Alejandro Cremades: But before even that, Anish, why engineering out of all things?
Alejandro Cremades: I mean, I know that in India there is a lot of pressure on the cultural side of things to either become a doctor or become an engineer. In your case, it was mechanical engineering.
Alejandro Cremades: So did you have like something going on there with problem solving that you got excited about like early on when you were a kid? Or how did the whole problem solving come knocking to you in your life?
Aneesh Reddy: Sorry that was my eight year old daughter who doesn't listen to anyone. So
Alejandro Cremades: I actually have three of those. So, well, I have one that is nine and and two that are that are eight.
Alejandro Cremades: Anyway, so so let's let's go back to to the question that that I asked, which was, how was it? team you know how How did the whole thing off um of problem solving you know come to you? How did you really get excited about problems that eventually led you to pursue the the engineering degree?
Aneesh Reddy: Right. yeah India, as you know, is a, it's more fashionable to be a doctor or ah engineering and an engineer in India. And, uh, both my parents were doctors and, and my dad sat me down in my ninth or 10th grade saying, uh, look, you need a lot of patients to be a, a doctor.
Aneesh Reddy: And I was someone who needed a little bit or more need for speed and some senses, you know, and, uh, and so he sat me down and said, probably you should, you should explore, you know, engineering, uh, and, uh,
Aneesh Reddy: And I was pretty good at math, you know, I was pretty good at math and physics and some of that. So it kind of came naturally, right? So, and then I had a pretty good four years and in campus as well.
Aneesh Reddy: You know I used to run a robotics club. Then in 2005, I had set up the entrepreneurship cell on campus. So, yeah, I think one thing led to another and I realized that, you know, I loved solving problems.
Alejandro Cremades: That's amazing. So after that, you know, you got the degree and you went to work for a large publicly traded company in India, which I think, you know, it played a really nice role for you because that was the most immediate step before you kind of like revisited your sense of purpose in life, which led you to entrepreneurship. So walk us through the sequence of events that that happened there leading to 2008, where you started to really rethink your life.
Aneesh Reddy: Right. Yeah, so 2006 is when I graduated from IIT. And like I said, you know, in 2005, you know, we had set up this entrepreneurship sale and the idea for that came from, you know, we were running a robotics club and we had to buy these, you know, motors and ICs and all that stuff to, you know, build build stuff, right?
Aneesh Reddy: And procuring them was a headache. So we thought, why might not build a company which, you know, had like hobby kits type thing. I mean, we didn't know how to do it. So that's how we said, okay, let's set up an entrepreneurship cell first.
Aneesh Reddy: And that meant that there was this bug of saying, let's solve a problem. ah And so I joined ITC, great job, amazing first pay. It's a top five public company in the country.
Aneesh Reddy: was doing very well there, you know, had moved two roles in like a two year period.
Aneesh Reddy: And, but there was this itch on the back saying, you know, like, what am I doing? Where am I, where do I fit in this big, which which small cog am I in this big wheel?
Aneesh Reddy: And thankfully, you know, we were, i was also, I didn't need to send any money home, right? So my parents were taking care of themselves. So i was like, it's a good time to do something and try something out, right? So this question of, you know, i am i adding real value? What's the purpose of doing all this?
Aneesh Reddy: I think ah drove me to say, okay, let's take a few years and start up and see where it goes, right?
Aneesh Reddy: So, You know, this was early 2008, two years into a job. So, and as you know, you it's not like I had much of work experience.
Aneesh Reddy: So I kind of went you know, me and Krishna, who's used to stay with me on the same floor at IIT, both of us said, let's let's go the investor way of picking two sectors that are doing very well and do something in between them, right?
Aneesh Reddy: So as those sectors grow, you will grow with it, right? So this was 2008. Retail was just beginning to happen in India.
Aneesh Reddy: The country had opened up, you know, for, international brands like a Walmart, a Levi's, etc. to come in. And at the same time, you know, the mobile story in India has been crazy, right? It's been like unbelievable, the mobile story. So we said, let's do something between retail and mobile.
Aneesh Reddy: We went back to IIT, took a small $30,000 scene loan
Aneesh Reddy: IIT took 4% of the company for that and came back, you know, and started off with that. And we then spent the next, this was August of 2008, just a month before Lehman Brothers' time.
Aneesh Reddy: Exactly a month before, right? And we would kind of go meet everyone in our networks who were in retail and mobile and ask them this question of, you know, we took it from IIT, we can build good software, tell us what your problems are.
Aneesh Reddy: and so ah So it was a very, so we we said that we won't write a line of code till someone is willing to pay us for it. right So that was the that was the bar kind of we set for ourselves.
Aneesh Reddy: And to our luck, Lehman crashed September 11, 2008. You the meltdown that happened afterwards. And as ah we would meet these these these customers in retail, you know we would keep hearing this thing saying, our same store sales are down, customers aren't coming back to stores. Pretty obvious, right? In a recession, and if you can solve that for us, we'll buy what you're selling even though it's a recession, right? so And we would then ask, saying, who are your customers?
Aneesh Reddy: you know Do you have a you build a... you know i This was back when you know you had to fill a long form to sign up for a loyalty program. You had to carry a card. And we were like, less than 5% of customers would sign up.
Aneesh Reddy: Because no one wants to go through that fixtures experience. We said, look, we'll run this on the mobile. ah if Everyone has a unique mobile number. We'll use that as the unique identifier. And whenever you want need to redeem points or redeem any currency, we'll drop you out if you like a bank.
Aneesh Reddy: You know so that was the thing that worked well.
Aneesh Reddy: Right. We had a problem, we had a new tech piece. You know, so we wrote the SaaS wave solving a real problem. Hey so I definitely, and you know I angel invest a fair bit and I see founders just keep building, keep building without talking to customers and going nowhere.
Aneesh Reddy: So I think that's the first, first ah thing. The second one is, look, if you really want to build something meaningful, something that lasts, it's going to take a while.
Aneesh Reddy: Like it's going to take 10, 20, I believe we just hit started as a public company. So we have another, at least another 10, 12 years to go. So it'll be a 30 year journey to building something that hopefully survives me.
Aneesh Reddy: Hey so and and so it is ah it is a marathon. Like it is not it's probably an ultra marathon or I'm an, not even a marathon, right? So so what that means is take care of yourselves, you know, take care of your family. In these need not come at the expense. A lot of times founders think that, look, success comes at the expense of all of this, right? Ah at least in my head, having lived that for the first 10 years of my life or 10 years of Capillary and then switching over to the other side, I do believe that, ah you know, spending time on your own mental health.
Aneesh Reddy: Making sure you have outlets beyond your business, right? Which is you have a good family, you have good friend circle.
Aneesh Reddy: I think really adds back to the success of the business, right? Adds back to, ah you know, you being less anxious or less fearful or less greedy.
Aneesh Reddy: And hence means that you take better decisions as ah as a founder, right? So those two. So one and a bonus.
Alejandro Cremades: And that's so profound, Anish. Thank you for sharing. For the people that are listening that would love to reach out and say hi, you know, learn more about Capillary, what is the best way for them to do so?
Aneesh Reddy: I'm on anish at capillarytech.com. Drop me an email. You know, happy to set up some time.
Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well, Anish, thank you so much for being on the Dealmaker Show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us.
Aneesh Reddy: Thanks, Alandro. I love the conversation. Thank you.
