Sujay Choubey: The Investor's Case For Going To The Grassroots

In the summer of 2020, as much of India's venture capital industry retreated indoors during the country's first pandemic lockdown, a young analyst at Blume Ventures was preoccupied with a question most of the market had already dismissed. Electric rickshaws were multiplying on the streets of India's smaller towns, yet the startups building the batteries and swapping stations behind them were widely seen as too niche and too low-tech to matter. One of those companies, a Delhi startup called Battery Smart, had been passed over by investors who viewed the humble e-rickshaw market as too small for serious returns. Mr. Choubey was not convinced the skeptics were right.

Rather than settle the question from a spreadsheet, he went to the source. By his own account, Mr. Choubey spent time with the rickshaw drivers who would actually use a swapping network, listening to how a two-minute battery swap changed the economics of their day and their willingness to move away from lead-acid batteries. The stories he brought back, he says, helped make the case for a market that looked marginal from a distance but was already reshaping livelihoods up close. Battery Smart has since grown into India's largest battery-swapping network for electric two and three wheelers, serving tens of thousands of drivers a day.

That instinct, to trust what he could see on the ground over what the consensus assumed, would come to define how Mr. Choubey worked as an investor.

Reading People Before Spreadsheets

Mr. Choubey describes early-stage investing as, at its core, the business of reading people. Financial models change, he argues, but a founder's motivations and resolve are what actually determine whether a company survives its inevitable hard seasons. He carried that belief onto the investment team at Peak XV Partners, the firm that split from Sequoia Capital in 2023 and now counts more than 450 portfolio companies across India and Southeast Asia.

One of the companies the firm backed while he was on the team, Attentive.ai, began as an unglamorous bet on software for American landscaping and outdoor-services businesses, backed early through Peak XV's Surge program. When the startup's early product struggled to find traction, Mr. Choubey recalls staying close to the founders rather than backing away. In working sessions with the team, he says, a pattern surfaced: customers were quietly pulling the tool into construction workflows, a far larger market. The company leaned into that signal with a construction takeoff platform, Beam AI, now used by more than a thousand contractors across the United States, and has gone on to raise from global investors including Insight Partners.

"Spreadsheets tell you what a company looks like today. People tell you what it will do when the plan falls apart, and the plan always falls apart. If you have spent real time with a founder, you know whether they will find a way through. That is the part of the job you cannot hand to a model."

A Method Forged Before Venture Capital

The habit of going to the ground predates his time in venture capital. Before Blume, Mr. Choubey spent close to three years at the Quality Council of India, an autonomous body set up by the government and industry, where he worked on large public projects. On one assignment for the railways, he recalls, his team's recommendation to speed up train turnaround times threatened to reduce work for blue-collar staff and set off a standoff with the unions. Rather than manage the dispute from a distance, he says, he sat with both the station managers and the union representatives, understood why the workers felt threatened, and helped rework the plan so that jobs were reallocated rather than lost.

Mr. Choubey traces some of that comfort to his upbringing in Patna, the capital of Bihar in eastern India, a place far from the country's startup hubs. He has spoken about being at ease in rooms and situations that many of his peers found unfamiliar, a disposition that has shaped how he approaches the work: the belief that the last and most important piece of any hard problem is usually found not at the center but at the edges.

"The last five percent of any hard problem is almost never in the room where the decision gets made. It is with the worker who is about to lose a shift, or the shopkeeper in a town nobody flies to. I have always been willing to go and find it."

Carrying the Instinct Forward

In May 2025, Mr. Choubey crossed from investing into building, taking a growth role at Composio, a San Francisco startup whose software helps AI agents connect to the tools that businesses already run on. The category is a long way from e-rickshaws and landscaping software, but the underlying instinct, he suggests, is the same: understand the people who actually use a product, and let that understanding, rather than the prevailing narrative, guide the decision.

It is a method that resists shortcuts. It does not scale neatly, and it rarely yields a clean answer on the first pass. But across a decade spent moving between government, venture capital, and now a fast-growing startup, Mr. Choubey has kept returning to the same conviction: that the answers worth having are usually found by going out to look for them.