₹55 Cr+
Client wealth advised
Co-founder of KamayaKya, a SEBI-registered research firm. I look for growth at fair valuations in India's overlooked smallcaps, and build the AI tools that surface it before the market reprices them.
In football, a good coach reads where the player has to be in three seconds, not where he is now. A good analyst does the same with a company, on a longer clock. An AI engine can do it across more signals than any single human can read end to end. Same instinct, every chapter: read the pattern before the field does.
Fourteen years of it, across sports, the consumer internet, and equity research.
In 2012 I founded United Football Networks, a solo venture out of Pune, and built UnitedBuzzz: an all-in-one platform for Manchester United fans worldwide, with a social network, blogs, standings, news, and match history. It grew to 800,000 followers across our digital channels, most of it on Facebook. It was bootstrapped, on the belief that being early would eventually pay.
It paid, but not how I expected. The network would not monetise at our size, so we pivoted to our own merchandise, t-shirts, jerseys, memorabilia, and the community came back as customers. We sold over a thousand pieces. Along the way UnitedBuzzz picked up Symbiosis as a client, and in 2015 we ran the Symbiosis International Students Council Tournament: 600 players, 30+ countries, ten days in Pune.
By 2017 we had wound down UnitedBuzzz and recovered most of the cost by selling the social pages we had built. The corporate entity became ANSK Consulting, which my father founded and runs; I hold a directorship and use it as my own advisory vehicle. I had dropped out of engineering by then.
The skill I was really learning was reading patterns across systems. Same instinct, every chapter that followed.
The coaching licences I took in 2014 were meant to be a hobby. A few months with Teach For India, a few at Pune FC's youth academy. By 2015 it had become a company, Zona Mista Sports, co-founded with Aman Bansal, and the Symbiosis relationship I had built through UnitedBuzzz migrated across to anchor the football-services business.
At its peak we ran programmes at 10+ Pune schools and four standalone turfs. The flagship was an 8-day residential camp at Symbiosis Lavale with international coaches led by Barry Knowles; a handful of those players went on to the Reliance Youth Foundation and ISL youth teams. When Covid froze the school model overnight, we ran online classes because the alternative was running nothing, and afterward expanded into basketball, volleyball, athletics, and cricket, because schools wanted one vendor, not many.
Zona Mista runs today without me in the operational seat.
Read where the player has to be in three seconds, not where he is now. The same pattern recognition, in a different language.
I had finished a BBA in Finance at Ness Wadia while running UnitedBuzzz and helping start Zona Mista, and the next field had started pulling. I had always been a reader, and connecting dots was the thing I did when no one was watching, which is most of what investing actually is. During Covid the time finally appeared.
In 2020 I joined a Pune brokerage and learned the craft at close range. I built the rest of the curriculum myself: The Thoughtful Investor was the first book that mattered, Zerodha Varsity the first formal coursework. Within months we were calling stocks that moved fast, the team grew, and I led the research. By October 2021 the founder and I had decided to build something larger together.
That year made my opinion specific. I came to believe Indian sell-side research repeats the same few mistakes every cycle: valuation lenses built for the past applied to decisions about the future, reactive coverage that follows results instead of reading the signals behind them, crowded large-cap coverage where the edge is already priced, and ninety-day horizons forced onto five-year compounding stories.
The framework I had been writing was built to refuse all four, on purpose.
In October 2021 we co-founded KamayaKya, Nitya Shah, Dhiren Shah, and me. The firm is bootstrapped and holds the SEBI Research Analyst registration (INH000009843). I serve as Co-founder, CEO, and Compliance Officer.
Four and a half years in: ₹55 Cr+ in client wealth advised, ₹1.14 Cr in FY26 revenue, 3,000+ paying subscribers, 31% CAGR over three years with 34 of 40 positions closed profitably. Five smallcase baskets across value, cyclical, dividend, and concentrated-HNI mandates, co-built with Nitya as fund manager. Zero regulatory incidents through my tenure as Compliance Officer. GrowthX Cohort 10 Demo Day finalist. A PGDM in Finance from IMT-CDL Ghaziabad completed alongside.
In parallel, across the same years and outside the firm, I have refined a 100-point scoring framework of my own.
The firm is the proof. The framework is the work that travels.
The framework is years of refinement. The AI tooling is finally good enough to scale the part a human cannot do alone, connecting dots across volumes of data no single analyst can read end to end.
I am building a causal idea engine: qualitative and quantitative signals combined so the system proactively surfaces a small set of high-conviction Indian listed candidates, each with the structural reason attached. The reason is the product. The same engine can underwrite a fund product layered on top.
I am building this now, and I am open to one of two things: a founding-team seat on a venture being built around it, or a platform partner that already has distribution and wants the framework and the IP inside it.
Capex at high utilisation or into value-added products, promoter buying, margin-mix shifts, policy and PLI tailwinds, turnarounds, strategic JVs.
EV/EBITDA for capital-intensive and cyclical names, P/B for financials where improving ROE signals a re-rating, PEG for stable growers. Never a PE multiple on a cyclical.
Cash-flow versus reported-profit divergence, related-party patterns, receivables bloat, promoter pledging, auditor changes, and more. The opportunity comes first; the forensics keep it safe.
Pre-committed conditions for when the signal degrades or when opportunity cost says the capital works harder elsewhere.
Real-time Strait of Hormuz signal layer: tanker transits, geopolitical risk, and the read-through to oil.
A daily macro-risk dashboard for India: 60 public-data signals across markets, credit, currency, geopolitics, and sentiment, in one view. Free, no sign-up.
Scores mutual funds and ETFs across 8 dimensions and 19 tiered triggers into a single 1-to-10 verdict, with basket-level commentary.
Most research engines find correlations. This one builds causal chains. Inputs: everything an institutional analyst reads on a normal day. Output: a small set of high-conviction Indian listed candidates with the structural reason for each one attached.
Aniket S. Kulkarni. Founder-operator. Co-founder, CEO, and Compliance Officer at KamayaKya, a SEBI-registered Research Analyst firm (INH000009843). Co-founder of Zona Mista Sports with Aman Bansal. Earlier, founded UnitedBuzzz, a Manchester United fan platform that grew to 800,000 followers.
Based in Pune. Travels often.
Off-hours I DJ as Mūditā: techno, deep house, the occasional progressive set. Once played a gig in Thailand for some free beers. Walked into a bar, asked if I could play, they said yes.