Patient Capital In The Age Of AI: Harsha Raghavan’s Long View On Building Durable Indian Businesses

At a time when capital markets have come to reward velocity, Harsha Raghavan remains interested in endurance. The founder and managing partner of Convergent Finance has spent more than three decades investing across India, the US and Europe, including stints at Goldman Sachs, Candover, Fairbridge Capital and Fairfax India, where he helped shape the group’s investment activities in India. His career has spanned more than $3 billion of investment activity across continents and a long list of boardrooms where capital was expected to do more than merely arrive. It had to improve the company meaningfully.

Artificial intelligence has compressed business cycles, shortened product road maps and made investors more impatient with businesses that cannot quickly explain their relevance. Harsha’s investment philosophy complements this velocity with quality across business cycles. Patient capital, in his telling, is not slow capital but capital with memory. It distinguishes between a temporary growth spurt and an enterprise with the institutional muscle to keep compounding through cycles. For Harsha Raghavan, the distinction is also about responsibility. He points to blowups like “Situational Awareness", where Leo Aschenbrenner purported to be the Nostradamus of AI and then promptly blew up. Harsha prefers to think in terms of “Generational Awareness", which brings with it a great responsibility to think about legacy and, with it, time-tested concepts such as business fundamentals and capital protection.

That distinction matters in India, where the next set of globally competitive companies may not come only from consumer internet, fintech or generic IT services. Engineering research and development is becoming an increasingly strategic component of global industrial competitiveness. NASSCOM and Everest Group estimate global enterprise ER&D spending to reach $2.5 trillion by 2030, while ER&D outsourcing is projected to grow to $135 billion by then. India’s role is also evolving from cost-efficient delivery towards co-innovation and systems-level engineering for global enterprises.

This is where companies such as Onward Technologies enter the argument. Convergent Finance is invested in this consistent compounder, with the stated intent of supporting the company’s expansion across India, the US and Europe, accelerating its digital engineering capabilities.

Onward Tech Was Not A Fashionable Start-Up

It remains an engineering-services company serving global OEMs across digital, embedded and mechanical engineering. Customers, global Industrials and Automotives, expect it to operate as their extended ER&D team, reporting robust gains from the speed and scale of its global presence across North America and Europe and offshore delivery centres in India. That may lack the theatre of consumer technology, but it carries many of the traits. Raghavan tends to prize domain depth, cash discipline, customer intimacy, export relevance and the opportunity to move up the value chain as global manufacturers rewire products around software, electronics, data and intelligent systems. Harsha saw in Onward Tech the kind of engineering company that could emerge as a long-duration winner in a changing global ER&D landscape.

The investment also illustrates a larger point about alpha. In public markets, alpha is often treated as a function of entry price or timing. In private equity, particularly the kind Harsha has practised, it is more often created in the years after capital is deployed. Over his investing career, Harsha has seen multitudes of business plans which are clearly predicated on “surfing” strategies—riding “waves” or trends to get a quick thrill before the next lull phase. Instead, while it may sometimes feel more staid and less thrilling, “sailing” strategies afford one the luxury of allowing one to take one’s business deterministically towards the horizon or goal within one’s vision.

Harsha admits his preference for resilient, cash-generating businesses led by experienced teams with a reputation for sound corporate governance. Onward Tech stands on the shoulders of a giant that is Mr. Harish Mehta, the cofounder of NASSCOM, who espouses the maverick narrative of collaboration beyond competition—a feature of how India IT was fundamentally built as a software services sandbox for the world. His stated emphasis on management alignment, best-in-class processes, cost discipline and long-term value creation explains why Raghavan’s investing vocabulary sounds closer to that of a patient investor than that of a flying consultant.

That institutional continuity has been carried forward under Managing Director Mr. Jigar Mehta, representing the second generation. Jigar has played a pivotal role in the company’s transformation and global expansion since assuming leadership in 2016. Driven by a vision centred on operational excellence, customer-centricity and sustainable growth, Jigar has built a highly accomplished global leadership team spanning three industry verticals. Together, they have added a high-quality portfolio of around 70 global customers, while expanding the company's presence across the USA, UK and Europe, balancing disciplined execution with long-term value creation.

Onward Tech’s Recent Financial Trajectory Helps Explain Why This Thesis Has Resonance

Over the last four years, the company has delivered a consistent compounding story, with revenue growing at a CAGR of 15.3%, while EBITDA has compounded at 35.4% and PAT at 17%. This performance reflects improving operating leverage, stronger execution and greater depth in customer relationships, transforming an engineering services business into a progressively more profitable growth platform. With 18 clients generating upwards of $1 million annually, Onward Tech has also announced a $3.5 million contract to establish a dedicated offshore development centre supporting power management requirements of data centres that enable seamless compute for AI operations.

Raghavan’s boardroom experience reinforces this bias toward institution-building. He has chaired or served on the boards of companies across consumer, aviation, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and technology services, and his career includes operational assignments such as serving as interim chief executive of Bangalore International Airport to oversee major capital expenditure programmes and rebuild the management team. The common thread is not sector expertise alone. It is the practice of looking for businesses where governance, leadership quality and capital allocation can change the slope of outcomes.

With the AI-forward reality of enterprises, technology hype cycles continue to contract dramatically, but the attributes of profitable growth have remained unchanged: strong leadership, sound governance, customer trust, reinvestment discipline and the ability to absorb new tools without surrendering strategic judgement. Engineering-led companies that serve global OEMs may benefit from this shift because AI, embedded systems, software-defined vehicles, digital twins, industrial automation and intelligent products all require deep domain context, not just generic coding capacity. NASSCOM notes that enterprises are moving from domain-centric talent models towards system-level capabilities and outcome-led commercial models.

This explains why Raghavan’s interest in Onward Tech is one part of his broader reading of India’s industrial future.

India’s ER&D services sector has evolved from support to end-to-end ownership of engineering and product-development initiatives. This has been enabled by talent, delivery maturity and a growing AI-led innovation ecosystem. In that context, the next wave of constant currency growth may not come from the loudest consumer/internet brands. It might just be driven by quiet engineering businesses designing the products, platforms and systems that power global industry.

For Raghavan, patient capital is a methodical approach. It asks whether a company can grow without losing discipline, adapt without compromising on its quality principles, and compound without confusing momentum for permanence. The answer may lie in businesses that are technically deep, quietly ambitious and governed for the long run.