We invest in India's internet & digital future.

Hornbill Capital is a dedicated Indian focused investor, backing the companies building India's digital economy — in public and private markets. We focus where the growth is.

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2014 Founded

11 Years of Investing

13 Team Members

2 Investment Strategies

The India opportunity

“India's internet and digital tech sector is where the most durable alpha is being built. We have designed our strategy, our process, our team around capturing it.”

A billion people connected. Internet data among the cheapest in the world. A national digital infrastructure — Aadhaar, UPI, DigiLocker — that gives businesses the rails to reach every Indian.

India's complexity was never a lack of demand. It was always a question of how that demand gets distributed, accessed, and served. Technology is answering that question and the companies doing so are where we invest.

We don't migrate.
We stay rooted.

arrow_forward MUM · 2014

19.0760° N, 72.8777° E

One forest, completely known.

We have stayed in the same forest — internet and digital technology in India. Over a decade of investing across public and private markets has compounded into something genuinely difficult to replicate from scratch: a view that is wide and deep in private markets, rigorous in public ones, and sharpened by the interaction between the two.

What we do +

Preferred Business Models

How we think about businesses

Effective use of data

The strongest businesses are the ones that genuinely understand their customers better over time. Every transaction, query, and interaction feeds back into the system, helping them refine product-market fit. This shows up in very tangible ways — lower customer acquisition costs, better targeting, and higher retention.

Network effects

In the best platforms, each new user makes the product more valuable for everyone else. As more buyers and sellers come on board, the ecosystem strengthens, creating a natural flywheel. Over time, this leads to market leadership that is difficult to disrupt and sustains itself across cycles.

III

Strong brand

In categories like financial services, insurance, or education — where many consumers are still making first-time decisions — trust plays a central role. A strong brand helps improve conversion, drives retention, and allows the business to expand into adjacent categories more efficiently.

Portfolio

Companies we have backed.

Examples of the businesses we invest in.

Company Thesis Strategy

01 NSE Exchange monopoly Public arrow_outward 02 Nazara Gaming network effects Public arrow_outward 03 PhysicsWallah Edtech category brand Private arrow_outward 04 Dhan Capital markets fintech Private arrow_outward 05 KreditBee Embedded credit distribution Private arrow_outward

How we invest

We invest in companies that become harder to beat the larger they get, from growth-stage private companies to listed market leaders. The same investment lens governs both.

Strategy / 01

Public Equity

A concentrated, long-only fund investing in listed companies in India's internet and digital technology ecosystem.

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Strategy / 02

Private Equity

We invest in growth and late-stage rounds in category-defining Indian companies in the private sector.

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Our Conviction

We have stayed true to our strategy since 2015.

India's internet and digital technology sector has structural tailwinds that will run for decades.

When we evaluate a company, whether listed or private, we ask the same questions: Does it have a structural advantage that compounds? Does it use data to get better over time? Does it have network effects or a brand that creates a genuine moat? Is management building for the long term?

Our work in private markets gives us an edge that most public market investors don't have — an early view of how the competitive landscape is evolving, well before it becomes visible in reported numbers.

Our Story

Named after a bird that never migrates.

The Hornbill bird doesn't migrate. It finds its forest, stays, and spends a lifetime learning it. We chose the name in 2014 for exactly that reason.

One forest. Completely known. Manoj Thakur founded Hornbill Capital with a clear view: India's internet and digital economy was becoming one of the most significant investment opportunities in the world, and the way to invest in it well was not to be broad, but to go deep.

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