About us

We are Samkhya.

Providing the best of financial navigation and valuation solution.

 

Valuation, as a function has hardly seen any advancement since past 25 to 30 years. Be it the back-of-the napkin calculation or the popular VC-method through an EBITDA multiple, our techniques and approach have remained frozen in time. This has led to bias, uncertainty and complexity creep into our valuations, especially when it comes to companies which have fewer data in comparison to established corporates.

As a result, there are companies which are solving one percenteer problems (perfume-as-a-subscription, anyone?) and can get funded in comparison to companies which are solving weighty, unsolved issues across health, environment, logistics and sometimes die due to lack of funds.

At Samkhya, we believe there is a better way to do valuation for companies, especially startups and small and medium businesses.

Valuation is both an art and a science. However, this art is ‘in the science’. It requires science as its sandbox. Samkhya automates the science so that art can bloom in full.

As a unique valuation platform, Samkhya provides the flexibility of three industry approved approaches, robust building of assumptions and stress-testing through scenario-analysis which gets exported to the smart reports in an instant.

A data-driven valuation model allows you to think about all aspects of your business and the value / cost attached to it. It brings out the implicit assumptions that are vague or not verified and needs to be called-out. These assumptions are the backbone of a financial model and making them robust helps build a compelling narrative for your company.

It is like doing the reps – painful but rewarding and you feel good that you have done the exercise. And at Samkhya, we attempt to automate the entire exercise for you. We help to systematically understand, design and differentiate your company’s business model by understanding the dollar value impact of the activities on the company’s value. And your investors are going to love you for it.

Someone once said, every company can be represented by an equation. At the heart of it, we do believe the same. If the black box of reaching up to product-market fit is solved, growth is a process which can be modeled and replicated. It can be represented by an equation, stress-tested and scenario-analyzed. And at Samkhya, it is our humble attempt to model growth leading up to the valuation of the company.

Valuation is one of the most mis-understood and least transparent aspects of capital raising, and we see that as an opportunity: We’re excited to simplify valuation for everyone through our software, process and education.

 

Founder

 

Hi, my name is Abhishek. It’s great to have you here.

Steve Jobs once said – “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” As I look back to where I have come from, I could only see that the path to this day was forged through my life-experiences and the work that I was only fortunate enough to do.

Finding meaning when working in finance for a large organization is not easy, especially when you optimize for impact. You realize that you are a tiny cog in a giant wheel. However, my work was meaningful for me. Even though the key impact of work was captured in the multiple tabs of Excel or the Powerpoint decks, which often gather dust in consulting engagements, I was comfortably numb knowing that I was learning how large organizations make decisions. And most importantly, I was making the products through which the client organizations took decisions. And building these products did teach me a lot.

A couple of examples – building a framework for a multi-dimensional profitability model so that the largest Middle Eastern Telecom company can increase the RoI on 4G showed me how the right framework can be a gamechanger in identifying the usage and RoI of network assets which are hard-to-price.

And a business case to justify a shared service set-up involving tens of thousands of job cuts and cost arbitrage savings for one of the largest healthcare company showed how an empirical analysis leads to a decision with the least amount of cognitive bias. 

As much as I was learning, I realised that financial intelligence has been into the domain of bigger companies which are going from strength to strength. Not a bad thing on its own, except that the mortality rate of startups and SMBs has been high. 

Lack of cash and working capital claims around one-third of startups. Startups are the torch-bearers of innovation. Small and medium businesses are the largest creator of jobs and the single largest drivers of economy. 

If the startups and SMBs can also have access to financial intelligence it would not only help them survive, but also thrive. It is with this mission to help companies with advanced financial intelligence and business valuation that Samkhya was born.

We have built Samkhya with investors, entrepreneurs and Finance professionals. In the age of AI, it would be a travesty if the way we measure value in companies is based on intuition, bias and complexity. We have deconstructed what goes into valuation by learning the latest education on valuation, by being part of LBO deals and by being involved in startup funding.

It is our attempt to bring in the very best of Finance intelligence to an entrepreneur anywhere in the world. Where a lack of finance knowledge does not inhibit growth. Where a virtual, AI-driven CFO helps in building personal monopolies and thriving companies.

For me, this is impact.

– Abhishek Verma