Tanush Pradhan · 2026
Project 01 · In Development

HEXVantage
HEXVantage

A private equity–style value creation platform for MSMEs. Frameworks for deal evaluation, performance tracking, and operational optimization — borrowing the discipline of PE thinking and applying it to underserved Indian businesses.

Role
Founder, Strategy & Design
Status
In Development
Started
Dec 2025
Tags
PE · MSME · Strategy
Context

India's MSME sector employs over 110 million people and contributes nearly 30% of GDP, yet most operate without the kind of structured operational rigor that private equity firms bring to mid-market companies in the US and Europe.

The gap isn't capital — there's plenty of patient capital looking for deployment. The gap is in evaluation frameworks, operational playbooks, and investment screening methodologies tailored to the realities of Indian MSMEs (informal accounting, owner-managed governance, fragmented data).

HEXVantage exists to bridge that gap.

Approach

I'm building HEXVantage as a structured framework — not a product yet, but a methodology — that combines three pillars:

  • A deal evaluation rubric adapted from PE buy-and-build playbooks, simplified for MSME-scale due diligence
  • A performance tracking layer that translates messy operational data into structured KPIs investors can underwrite
  • An operational optimization toolkit — checklists, SOPs, and intervention frameworks for the most common MSME bottlenecks

The reading list behind this work draws heavily from Walker Deibel's Buy Then Build, classic PE due diligence literature, and Indian MSME field reports from CII and FICCI.

Outcomes

Currently in framework development. Early-stage deliverables include:

  • A draft deal evaluation scorecard tested against three sample MSME profiles
  • A partner-onboarding model translating commercial decisions into operational steps
  • Working notes on buy-and-build sequencing for fragmented industries

The longer-term goal is to publish the framework openly and use it as the basis for a more structured value-creation studio.

What I learned

The biggest learning so far: most PE frameworks fall apart at the data layer in the Indian MSME context. The cleaner the input data, the better the framework works — which means a huge portion of the value is actually in helping MSMEs structure their own data before any evaluation can happen.

That's reframing the whole project. The "due diligence framework" is now downstream of a "data structuring framework" — and that's a much more interesting problem.