Imagine pitching to 200 companies over the course of a year only to have 180 turn you away. It’s the sort of rejection that can fell a lesser mortal.
Aamer Khan is 27 going on 28, but in conversation, you could easily mistake him for someone a couple of decades older. He doesn’t correct the impression: “It gets me into a room,” he says with a shrug. The solemn tenor of his speech is measured, formal and very unlike the irreverent cadence of someone not quite thirty. But what you notice first is not the premature greying in his beard (“genetics”), but his audacious curiosity. And how he listens. When Aamer listens to you, the world disappears; you find yourself spilling secrets you’d never dream of telling another soul.
Ask him what he wanted to be as a child and he has nothing. What he offers instead is a negative, “I always had the fear of being mediocre. I always wanted to be bigger than anything around me, at least. I don’t know big in what sense.”
In 2021, Aamer started a podcast through which he hoped to platform interesting, everyday people and tell their stories. He gave himself a timeline – eighteen months – if he hadn’t made any money at the end of that period, he’d move on. He says he went back at the three-year mark to validate his decision: “The downloads were approximately the same. If you leave something on the Internet, it’s always there for people to go back to, and people still didn’t go back to it.” He needed it confirmed dead. But it also validated something else. “I didn’t know I had it. Second stage of my life, I knew I had it, but I was not using it quite well. And the third stage is now.” He means the listening. It is the only thing he claims to be good at, and he brought all of it to his next gig.
the cocoon
What he decided to do next was a homecoming, of sorts. Aamer grew up in the pharma engineering world. Words like aseptic and ACH and OEB 5 and laminar flow – science fiction to the average teenager – were the ambient dialogue of his childhood.
The Indian pharma engineering sector is the invisible engine that powers biopharma manufacturing in much of the Global South. Companies, for the most part, are family-held, frequently profitable and allergic to outside capital. Promoters reach retirement looking to the next generation as their exit plan. A mere handful have opened a pathway to professional management. Fewer still have accepted investor capital. South Korea faced the same problem and solved it differently, by building ownership structures that let families keep control across generations. Japanese family firms have a real institutional answer in adopted adult heirs and outside successors. India built neither. “The industry is in a cocoon. They know what’s out there. But they’re afraid to take the first step.”
Companies that peaked at 30 or 40 crores of revenue are valued at their revenue, because nothing has tested the number. “Unless somebody gives you a cheque for a percentage of your company, your company valuation is zero, no matter how many independent valuers come and assess your company.”
Enter the Alanar One Health Fund, which Aamer manages, a ₹126 crore Category II AIF focused exclusively on the Indian pharma engineering sector. Not a venture capital firm, he insists; “too close to a vulture”. Escalator capital then, not vulture capital.
four out of five
Aamer is the first to admit that promoters who have rejected him aren’t being irrational.
On paper, a stake is a percentage, but in an Indian family-run firm, it is seen as a leash. The company is often intertwined with the promoter’s sense of self. He built it from the ground up, and a slice of that does not translate into anything he recognises. But the objection underneath goes deeper than sentiment. It is not the investment he fears so much as what comes with it: control, veto, exit clauses. A twenty per cent shareholder with a deadline can put a family’s legacy up for sale.
The shares are not free to move anyway. In these companies they are how the family has divided itself: the brother who stayed, the one who left, the daughter’s portion, the branch that was settled. Nobody has ever had to put a number to any of it.
And nothing is forcing the question. The business is profitable. From inside the room, there is no visible ceiling.
This wariness of investor money is not unfounded. Enough founders have been displaced, enough rounds coerced, that caution has become pattern recognition. The trouble is that at a first meeting, the good investor and the bad one look exactly the same.
100% of nothing
Then the flip side, which Aamer has watched happen to good companies.
A company peaks. The promoter turns sixty with nowhere to go. Nobody to run the show, and no exit until somebody offers one. If the children want it, they inherit a business with no money to grow it. So the company does what it can afford to do. It manages costs. It holds the line. “There is no thinking beyond yourself,” he says, “because you don’t have the bandwidth to think beyond yourself.”
Meanwhile, another thirty new companies mushroom to challenge the status quo, taking projects at lower prices, and the legacy the founder wanted disappears by the minute. “They call it a legacy when you’re not in it. When you’ve gone, you’ve passed away, and only the name lives on. Not even your name, your company’s name. Up until then, it’s just you and your company.”
Aamer is blunt about where it ends. “We’ve seen a lot of companies die because they took on too much debt, couldn’t manage their finances well, thought they needed a bigger factory when all they needed was operational efficiency.” And he’s even more candid about the maths that is often missed: “own half of a thousand-crore company than all of a hundred-crore one.”
Aamer is fine with walking away unsuccessful so long as he’s planted a seed in whoever he’s just met that this is a conversation they should be having. His pitch gives away his whole ambition. If not with him, then with someone else. “You’re a horse, you’re running in a race. At some point, become the jockey, man. And after some time become the bookie, I don’t know.”
He says some meetings go very well, and the person says no. Sometimes he walks out thinking it was a disaster, and they want to move ahead. He takes the failures as his to fix: “It is on me to change perceptions,” and says the odds are the appeal. “I’ve loved the chase more than the result. Always.”
chain reaction
As of publishing, about ₹103 crore of the ₹126 crore has been committed, with ₹23 crore still to be raised. It has invested ₹50 crore in five companies so far, a sixth in progress: capsule machines in Kolkata, sterile process equipment in Mumbai, a fans and solar business also in Mumbai, a biotech in Hyderabad, a data centre builder in Pune.
Aamer is adamant about not wanting control. “We understand not to change the DNA of companies” the fund invests in, the very thing that made the company investable in the first place. He wants to prove to promoters that investor money is about uncaging ambition, not control. “Somebody who’s tasted failure would eventually look for people not wanting to make the same mistake.”
Most of what the fund does is small: ten or fifteen per cent of a company already fit to list, twenty-six to thirty-three per cent of one a bigger buyer will want later. The one exception is 45 per cent, which he says is the only exception, not the rule.
He talks about getting eighty or ninety per cent of the portfolio to a level where other companies copy them. “That would mean a successful Alanar, more than anything.” Then, as he hears himself say it, “This might scare some people. As a fund manager, you’re supposed to look at returns.”
He would like, eventually, enough money to fund a foundation of his own. He has not yet worked out what it would be for. “I don’t have some cause that I’m very close to. I want to have that.”
When he first started, his last name got him fifteen minutes with the people he wanted to meet. Today, Alanar does. Alanar One Health Fund is the first of its kind in an industry that has spent forty years declining to be invested in. And that in itself makes him extraordinary.
