Every new-age tech company in India shows you the same three slides. Revenue growth. Total addressable market. A path to profitability that starts two years from now and never arrives on schedule.
None of those slides tell you if the business actually works.
Three numbers do.
LTV to CAC.
The rate of change in growth, not the growth rate itself.
And the line item almost nobody reads closely: indirect and other expenses.
Start with LTV/CAC. A customer who costs you more to acquire than they will ever pay you back is not a growth story. It’s a subsidy program with a stock ticker. The rule of thumb institutional investors use is a ratio of 3x or higher for a business to be healthy on its own economics, not propped up by fresh equity. Below that, growth is just the company buying revenue. Above it, growth is compounding. Same revenue line. Completely different business.
(LTV stands for Lifetime value and CAC stands for Customer Acquisition Cost)
Then look at the rate of change, not the level. A company growing revenue 35% this year sounds identical to one that grew 60% last year and 35% this year. It isn’t. Decelerating growth off a smaller base is a different animal from accelerating growth off a larger one, even when the headline number matches. The market prices the second derivative long before it prices the first. Investors who only track “is revenue up” get the direction right and the timing wrong, which in this cohort is the whole game.
Then go to indirect expenses. This is the line most retail investors skip entirely, and it’s where a lot of new-age tech quietly loses money that never shows up in the gross margin story. Employee stock costs, “other expenses,” marketing that gets reclassified, one-off items that repeat every single quarter until they’re not one-off anymore. A company can show gross margin expansion and operating margin destruction in the same result, and the difference lives entirely below the line most people stop reading at.
Put these three together and you stop asking “is this company growing” and start asking “is this growth paying for itself, accelerating or decelerating, and actually reaching the bottom line.” That question separates the fourteen companies I’m covering into two very different buckets. Some pass on two of three. A smaller number pass on all three. None of them pass by accident.
This is the lens. Not a stock pick, not a target price. A framework you can point at any new-age tech name, listed or unlisted, and get an honest answer back.
14 companies. One framework. Two hours. 30th August.
I’m going deep on LTV/CAC, growth rate of change, and indirect expense quality across the listed new-age tech cohort, company by company, number by number.
No recommendation to buy, sell or hold anything. Views are personal. Just the framework, applied in public, so you can run it yourself on the next earnings call.
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Growth Titans of Q1 - 13th September, 2026
Disclaimer: Neither Saket Mehrotra nor Beta to Alpha is a SEBI registered investment advisor. Views are my own and do not represent my previous or current employer. Any mention of stocks and securities is not a recommendation to buy / sell. The author may hold positions in the stocks mentioned and sell it without prior notice. Please do your own due diligence before investing. The purpose of this newsletter is for educational purposes only.
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