Rahul Agarwal
RASA Group's Founder and CEO, Rahul Agarwal, has built his own career on scaling businesses across very different sectors, from real estate to wellness to automobiles. With NEXT UNICORN, he's turning that experience outward, creating a platform that takes founders through business evaluation, an international immersion at China's Canton Fair, and potential investment of up to â¹10 crore. In this conversation, Agarwal speaks about the gap in India's startup ecosystem that inspired the platform, how founders and businesses will be selected from a pool of 5,000-6,000 applicants, and what he hopes NEXT UNICORN will ultimately mean for India's entrepreneurial landscape.
Inputs by Rahul Agarwal, Founder & CEO, Avani Infratech, RASA Group.
1. What gap in India's startup ecosystem inspired you to launch NEXT UNICORN, and how is it different from existing accelerator and investment platforms?
Most platforms in this space are built around one thing at a time, either you get mentorship, or you get capital, or you get market exposure, rarely all three in one journey. I kept meeting founders who had already proven their businesses worked, they had traction, they had customers, but they were stuck exactly where I once was myself, figuring out how to scale without the right guidance or access.
That's really the gap NEXT UNICORN is built for. It isn't for someone with just an idea on a slide deck. It's for founders already in the game, who need three things at once, sharper business evaluation, real international exposure, and potentially capital to back what they've already built. Taking finalists to the Canton Fair in China is part of that, it's not a reward trip, it's meant to expose them to sourcing, scale, and market thinking most Indian founders never get access to this early.
So the difference isn't really about being bigger or flashier than existing programmes. It's about sequencing the right kind of support at the right stage, evaluation, global exposure, and investment, rather than offering founders just one piece and leaving them to figure out the rest on their own.
2. You have said that starting a business is often easier than scaling it. Based on your entrepreneurial experience, what are the biggest challenges founders face while moving from early traction to sustainable growth?
Starting up has a certain energy to it, you're solving one problem, proving one idea works, and that clarity keeps you moving. Scaling is messier. Suddenly you're making decisions on product, people, capital, and distribution all at once, and getting any one of them wrong can undo the traction you worked so hard to build.
Hiring is usually where founders struggle first. The instincts that helped you build something as a small, scrappy team don't automatically translate into building and trusting a larger organisation. A lot of founders hold on too tightly, and growth stalls because everything still runs through them personally.
Capital discipline is another one. Early traction can create pressure to raise or spend faster than the business is actually ready for, and that mismatch causes real damage later. And distribution, figuring out how to reach customers beyond your first, most obvious market, is something founders often underestimate until they hit a wall.
None of these problems are unusual, I've faced versions of all of them myself. What's often missing isn't effort or ambition, it's someone who's been through it before, pointing out the blind spots early enough to actually matter.
3. What key criteria will be used to select the Top 30 founders and eventually the six finalists from approximately 5,000-6,000 applicants?
We're really judging two things together, the founder and the business, but if I had to pick which one carries more weight, it's the founder. A great market opportunity in the hands of the wrong founder rarely goes anywhere, so that's always our starting point: do we see someone with the clarity, resilience, and hunger to actually build this into something larger.
Once that's established, we move to the business itself, and there are a few things we look at closely. Market opportunity is one, is this a space with genuine room to grow, or a narrow, saturated one. Stage of the business matters too, we're looking for founders who've already moved past the idea stage and have something real running, not just a plan on paper.
Beyond that, we pay close attention to repeat and recurring customers, because that tells us far more about whether people actually want what's being built than any pitch deck can. And we look hard at the path to profitability, not necessarily profitable today, but a business with a credible, thought-through route to getting there.
None of these sit in isolation. A founder who's exceptional but hasn't found traction yet, or a business with strong numbers but a founder we're not convinced by, both get weighed carefully rather than judged on one factor alone. It's this combination, founder first, business fundamentals close behind, that shapes who makes it through to the Top 30, and eventually the final six.
4. How will NEXT UNICORN ensure that promising founders from smaller cities and less-visible sectors receive a fair opportunity during the selection process?
Fairness here wasn't left to chance, it was built into how the selection panel approached the Top 30 from the outset. Every business was evaluated against the same predefined criteria I just spoke about: founder quality, market opportunity, traction, and path to profitability, applied consistently, regardless of where a founder was based or how visible their sector already was.
Beyond that consistency, there was a deliberate thrust toward diversity in the final Top 30, we wanted businesses from genuinely varied industries represented, not a shortlist that skewed toward whatever sectors happen to get the most attention or funding conversations today. A founder solving a real problem in a less glamorous category deserved the same shot as one building in a space that naturally draws more buzz.
I think this matters more than people realise. India's startup energy isn't concentrated in a handful of cities or a handful of trending sectors; it's far more distributed than the funding headlines usually suggest. If NEXT UNICORN only surfaced founders from the usual places, we'd be missing a large part of what we actually set out to find.
So the honest answer is, we didn't create a separate track or quota for smaller cities or overlooked sectors; we simply made sure the evaluation itself stayed fair and consistent, and let a deliberately diverse Top 30 emerge from that process rather than forcing it artificially.
5. Why was the Canton Fair in China chosen for the international business immersion, and what practical outcomes do you expect the finalists to gain from this exposure?
The Canton Fair isn't a curated, polished showcase, it's one of the largest trade exhibitions in the world, real manufacturers, real sourcing, real scale, all in one place. That rawness is exactly why I wanted to take finalists there instead of a more conventional business trip.
Most Indian founders, even ambitious ones, haven't seen global sourcing and manufacturing at that scale up close. Walking through it changes how you think about your own supply chain, your pricing, and what's actually possible if you rethink how you source or manufacture.
Practically, I expect finalists to come back with a sharper sense of where their business sits globally, not just domestically. Some will spot sourcing efficiencies they hadn't considered. Others will see product categories or manufacturing approaches that open up entirely new directions. It's the kind of exposure that's very hard to replicate through mentorship sessions or case studies alone, you genuinely have to stand on that floor to understand what it teaches you.
6. How will RASA Group help the finalists convert their learnings from China into tangible improvements in areas such as sourcing, product development, distribution and market expansion?
Exposure on its own doesn't create change, it's what happens after the trip that actually matters. The China immersion is meant to be a starting point, not a standalone experience, which is why it sits inside a larger journey that includes business evaluation, mentorship, and potential investment.
Once finalists return, the idea is to work through what they actually saw and identify what's realistically applicable to their business, whether that's a sourcing relationship worth pursuing, a product tweak worth testing, or a distribution approach worth adapting to the Indian market. That's where RASA's own operating experience comes in, we've built and scaled businesses across very different sectors ourselves, and that execution experience is what we bring to helping founders translate an idea from the fair into something concrete in their own business.
It won't look identical for every founder, a packaged food business and an automotive brand won't take the same lessons from Canton. But the underlying approach stays consistent, turn exposure into a specific, actionable next step, rather than letting it remain just a memorable trip.
7. The finalists may receive an investment of up to â¹10 crore. What factors will determine which businesses receive investment and how much funding they are offered?
The â¹10 crore isn't a fixed number every finalist automatically receives, it's a ceiling based on what we believe a business can genuinely absorb and put to productive use. Scalability sits right at the centre of that decision, whether we can see a credible path for this business to grow meaningfully larger than it is today.
We'll also be looking closely at what the China exposure reveals about each founder, how they process new information, whether they can translate that exposure into real decisions for their business. That, combined with the fundamentals we assess through the Delhi Founder Experience, business model, traction, team strength, gives us a fuller picture than financials alone would.
Funding amounts will vary founder to founder, because the businesses themselves are at different stages and need different levels of capital to scale responsibly. Some may need less capital and more strategic guidance. Others may need meaningful investment to move to their next phase. The goal isn't to write the largest possible cheque, it's to back businesses where we genuinely believe the capital will translate into real, sustainable growth.
8. Beyond capital, what mentorship, strategic guidance and execution support will RASA Group provide to help the selected businesses scale?
Capital is often the easiest part of this kind of programme to offer, and honestly, the least differentiated. What I think matters more is what comes with it, and that's execution experience.
RASA itself operates across very different sectors, real estate, food, wellness, automobiles, and each of those businesses has had to solve its own version of the scaling problem. That gives us a fairly wide lens to draw from when a founder is dealing with a hiring challenge, a distribution bottleneck, or a decision about entering a new market.
Beyond direct mentorship, founders will get access to the broader RASA ecosystem itself, whether that's operational know-how, category-specific insight, or simply a sounding board from people who've made similar decisions before, and sometimes gotten them wrong. The support is meant to be practical rather than theoretical, less about frameworks and more about the specific decisions a founder is actually facing at their stage of growth.
9. Since the Delhi Founder Experience will be filmed, how will you ensure that the programme remains a credible business-evaluation platform rather than becoming primarily an entertainment format?
The filming is a byproduct of the process, not the reason for it. The Delhi Founder Experience exists to evaluate real businesses, understand what founders have built, and figure out who deserves to move forward, that evaluation would happen with or without cameras in the room.
That said, I'm not naive about the fact that a filmed format creates its own pressures, there's always a temptation to lean into drama over substance. The way we guard against that is by keeping the actual evaluation criteria, business fundamentals, scalability, founder capability, separate from anything to do with how a segment might look on screen. Founders are being assessed on their business, not their performance for a camera.
If NEXT UNICORN is going to mean anything to the founders who go through it, and to future applicants, it has to hold up as a genuine evaluation process first. The filmed element can make the founders' journeys visible to a wider audience, but it can't be allowed to influence who we actually choose to back.
10. How will you measure the success of NEXT UNICORN's first season, and what is your long-term vision for developing the platform in India and potentially beyond?
In the short term, success looks fairly concrete to me, did the finalists walk away with real, usable exposure from China, and did we back businesses that go on to grow meaningfully over the next few years. If a few years from now some of these founders have built genuinely larger, more resilient businesses because of what they gained through this programme, that's the clearest signal it worked.
Longer term, I'd like NEXT UNICORN to become a recurring platform, not a one-off initiative, something founders across India actively look forward to applying for each year. RASA Group itself is aiming for a strong pan-India presence over the next three to five years, and I see NEXT UNICORN as part of that same ambition, discovering and backing the founders who'll help build India's next generation of significant businesses.
Whether it eventually extends beyond India is something I'd rather let the first couple of seasons prove out before committing to. Right now, the focus is on doing right by this first batch of founders and making sure the model genuinely works before we think about scaling the platform itself.
