Family Offices Have Become Critical to India’s Capital Markets: Rishabh Mariwala

In my head, yes. We grew up in a joint family building in South Bombay. My grandfather, father, uncles, all on different floors of the same building. I've seen all of them work together. So, of course you assume that's your path. I actually wanted it; it wasn't just an external expectation.

When I joined the Kaya [skin-care company] team as a junior member. That is when I realised my father's whole philosophy was that the business should be family-owned but professionally run.

I was very proud of what my father had built. And if you are proud of something, you try to make it part of your identity. But I realised that it was my father’s identity. It is not my identity. That is when the shift happened. And I had to ask myself, ‘what am I doing for me’.

Before Sharrp there was a consumer brand I built from scratch, a premium soap business. A proper zero-to-one journey. I was out there selling soaps myself, going to customers' homes, doing exhibitions, going to every retailer from Shoppers Stop to Hypercity to Bombay Store. Manufacturing, distribution, all of it.

At that time there was no D2C [direct to consumer], no Amazon marketplace. If I were starting the same brand today, it would be a very different story, digital-first, D2C. But I started in 2010, and that was the world then.

I ran it for about five years. By year five, I had a clear sense that I'm a better investor than an entrepreneur. I told my father I wanted to shut it down. But he said either you scale it or you sell it. It would have taken 20–30 years to scale the business, and it would not have been half the size of my father’s business, Marico [a consumer-goods company].

Luckily, I found a buyer in Marico. They're running the brand [PureSense] today. And that freed me up to go full time into investing.

It happened very organically. In 2015, Marico paid out dividends and promoters got more liquidity. I went to my father and said instead of putting all your eggs in one basket, Marico, why don't we invest in public markets and venture capital?

I had been curious about venture capital for a while. What fascinated me was that you invest in a business and live vicariously through the founder. My father entertained that and said he wouldn't give me too much capital but would give me some to see what I could do. So, while I was still running my own business, we started investing on the side.

Between 2015 and 2020, we made about 15–20 investments. When I look back, only the ones we really understood had performed.

The others, a security-hardware provider for banks and a clinical research company, businesses we had no real ability to underwrite. We did them anyway and predictably they didn't work. That was the learning that shaped everything that came after.

Quite significantly. Between 2015 and 2020, we were stage-agnostic and sector-agnostic. We backed all kinds of businesses. From 2020, we moved to being very focused—consumer and pre-Series A only. We wanted to go early in businesses where we understood the category and could bring real value beyond just capital.

Then the market changed in 2025. Pre-seed valuations are no longer small. So, we shifted to what I'd call a barbell approach: either very early, where we can own 10–15% of the business, or very late—three to four years from IPO [initial public offering], where there's enough data to underwrite the business confidently and you still get a good entry. The sector stays consumer throughout. That's non-negotiable.

We now have 37–38 investments across the portfolio. We've backed a lot of consumer funds early on—all consumer-focused. But now we're doing fewer funds and more direct investments because that's where the real compounding happens.

Completely. I know what it takes to build a business in India from zero. I've experienced the emotional grind of it. So, when a founder comes to me with a problem that may look like incompetence or bad luck to an outside investor, I usually understand exactly what happened and why. That empathy is real. 

And I want to live vicariously through the founders I back. I know how hard it is and I genuinely respect anyone who stands up and tries to build something. So, when I engage with them it's not just financial oversight. I want to know what they're learning, what's not working, what they're seeing in their customers. Learning flows both ways.

First, be completely clear about risk appetite and what are real return expectations. Vague expectations cause real problems later.

Second, decide how much time you are actually going to spend. For me, this is a full-time job. The amount of time you spend should actively dictate the asset classes.

Third, think hard about in-house versus outsource. What can you genuinely build expertise in and what should be left to specialists.

I hear this and I understand where it comes from. But I think it misunderstands what we actually do. We're not silent spectators. We're active investors: on boards, engaged with numbers, engaged with founders, helping them navigate their businesses. The capital we deploy is going into real businesses that create real jobs and real value. That's not the easy way out.

Also, we're putting high-risk capital to work. There's a real chance of losing it. This is not capital sitting in fixed deposits or parked in safe instruments. We're backing early-stage consumer businesses where most will not work out. That's a very different risk profile from what a lot of people assume when they hear about family offices.

A family office is not just about creating alpha. It is about creating the right systems, structures and mechanisms for not just wealth preservation, but wealth creation.

The best institutions have strategy, covenants, governance and clear mandates. That's what we're trying to build.

Family offices are now the third-largest source of venture capital globally. India is third in the world on VC deal volume from family offices. That's not a small thing. And it matters enormously for India specifically because FIIs [foreign institutional investors] are exiting. Global capital is becoming unreliable.

If domestic capital, from family offices, from DIIs [domestic institutional investors], doesn't step in, we become dependent on foreign capital that can leave at any time.

The journey in public markets from FII-dominated to DII-dominated is underway. In private markets, too, the direction is clear. Family offices are a critical part of that transformation.

We are really lucky to be invested in Nykaa [online beauty retailer]. We really wanted to bet the house on it. I was a skincare entrepreneur. I saw the writing on the wall early. But my father stopped me from putting more money into it.  

In hindsight, that guardrail on the quantum of capital was a good thing as that allowed me to be a lot more disciplined, structured and rigorous in my thought process and decision making. This has actually paid out well across the portfolio.

It comes as a package. You can't fully separate them. Businesses will pivot. The product today is often not the product three years from now. The market changes.  

So, at the early stage especially, what you're really backing is the founder's ability to power through when things go sideways, which they always do. Can this person navigate, adapt, lead through difficulty?  

And then there's founder-market fit: is this person genuinely passionate about this space, not just chasing a white space that looks attractive on a spreadsheet? But you can't completely ignore the product or the category either.  

If the market is structurally difficult or the product has fundamental problems, even a great founder runs out of the road. So, it's weighted towards the founder at an early stage, but it's still a package.

The hardest have been governance failures, not the companies that made wrong strategic calls. The latter I can accept, that's the nature of early-stage investing.  

What really shakes you is when a founder behaves badly with the capital. We made several investments during Covid where we couldn't meet the founders in person, you couldn't do the normal diligence of sitting across someone and reading them.  

Some of those founders went and splurged the capital on IPL [Indian Premier League] advertising for no clear reason. One of them was showing fake invoices. Those are the ones that make you question yourself: what we missed in our diligence and why. 

The other hard thing is losing a good team member. We had someone with us for six years who then wanted to retire. When good people leave after that long, you have to rebuild the thought process and culture of the team almost from scratch. Governance failures and losing key people stay with you in a way that bad investments don't.

For Sharrp specifically, our international investments are still a very small decimal. Global markets are much larger. The quantum of capital needed to make a real dent in Silicon Valley or anywhere in the West is of a completely different order. So, I can't claim we've had a meaningful impact internationally as a single-family office. 

But zooming out to family offices as a class, LRS [liberalised remittance scheme] allows only $250,000 per person per year. As a family of four, that's $1mn. That's genuinely not moving any needle globally. The structural limits are real.

I have a knack for naming. I enjoy naming. So Sharrp is made up of the initials of my family members—S is for my son and daughter, H is my father, A is my mother, the first R is my sister, the second R is me and P is my wife. It works on two levels: it's personal, it's about the family, and we are also very focused and sharp in what we do. So, the name resonated on both counts. 

Definitely. I want to build Sharrp the way my father built Marico through professionalisation. That means the right talent, proper retention systems, technology, governance structures, decision-making frameworks that don't depend on any one person. The goal is an institution that will outlive me and that functions even when I'm not in the room. 

The market only respects you when your track record is consistent not because you got lucky once, but because you have a repeatable process of identifying the right founders and backing them across cycles.