There is a quiet confidence that’s hard to miss when you speak to Vatsal Rastogi and Nitin Bhadauria, the co-founders of Lucidity, a no-ops autoscale solution for cloud storage. The longer you speak to them, the more you come to understand what has shaped this – years of pushing against boundaries, dogged networking, and a sheer grit that helps founders succeed.

Vatsal and Nitin come from similar backgrounds, in that they both come from humble middle-class families from small towns in Uttar Pradesh. Neither of their families have ever run a business, much less owned one. Yet, the two set sights on setting up companies of their own.

Nitin and Vatsal were introduced to each other through Vatsal’s brother, and the two connected over their shared passion for entrepreneurship. Through their discussions, they discovered a market gap in cloud storage management. 

In other words, an opportunity. 

The duo devised a solution that helps companies manage their cloud storage more efficiently, thereby bringing down the operational burden and cost. With Lucidity, any company can auto-scale their cloud requirements up or down, while reducing their dev-ops spend and optimizing their block storage – all with no manual intervention. Lucidity’s golden promise is 2X performance with no code change and practically no downtime with up to 70% cost saving. 

On 12 February 2025, the company announced that it raised $21 million in a Series A round led by WestBridge Capital. Its existing investor, Alpha Wave Global, also participated in the round. 

Back in September 2021, six months after incorporation, Lucidity had announced raising $5.3 million in seed funding, in a round led by AlphaWave Global, with participation from their pre-seed investors BoldCap, Beenext and Blume.

“We believe very few product companies from India have cracked global enterprise GTM,” says BoldCap’s Sathya Nellore Sampat about Lucidity. “It has the potential to build a $100M-revenue business with 250-300 customers. Nitin and Vatsal are relentless entrepreneurs going after this vision, and we are very fortunate to be backing them,” he adds. 

The founders are similarly big champions of BoldCap. “Sathya is a sounding board for our GTM strategy. He understands enterprise sales motion and is very patient with us. More so, he has been a great friend with whom we can share the highs and lows of running a startup,” says Nitin.

‍Steps to a startup

To Nitin and Vatsal, it was obvious that they would be co-founders as the idea of Lucidity took shape. By then, they had known each other for three years.

“I have three questions that help me decide if I should be starting a company: a) do I have domain expertise, b) do I have a good co-founder, and c) do I have what it takes to build this long-term,” says Vatsal.  

For Lucidity, Vatsal knew he had the tech expertise and could take lead on the product. With Nitin came experience in sales and Go-To-Market strategy. Between them, the important basics were covered, and addressed the first two questions on Vatsal’s list.

As for question three, Vatsal says both men at the time were trying to figure what was the next meaningful thing they could do in their lives. 

“I had tried some ideas – I wouldn’t even call them startups; they were hobbies. I was clear though, I wanted to start my own venture, and realised being at Microsoft wouldn’t teach me enough about how to do it,” says Vatsal. 

He was recruited by Microsoft in 2014, straight out of BITS Pilani where he finished his B.Tech. Landing this job was the ‘big dream’ for Vatsal then. “I didn’t really know about any other company, so I always wanted to work at Microsoft. I first worked in research in Natural Language Processing, and later with the Azure team in Hyderabad. After four years, I realised I had to move to a startup if I wanted to learn more about building a company.”

In 2017, Vatsal made the jump to Swiggy, joining the team in Bengaluru. “Being here was transformative for me. It was a young, passionate team with 20-odd people in dev-ops. I actively discovered ongoing challenges and worked on solving them,” he says of his learning experience. 

One of the challenges was Swiggy’s cloud spend during the Covid-19 pandemic. While the business was heavily impacted, cloud spend had not reduced dramatically. The team had to figure out streamlining Swiggy’s infrastructure cost, and had helped make significant reductions. However, Vatsal realised this was not making a noticeable difference to cloud spend due to the rigidity of storage provisioning. 

This became a problem statement Vatsal and Nitin would dwell on, which eventually led to the idea of Lucidity.

“We identified that companies were struggling to manage their cloud storage, though they were spending huge amounts on it. In fact, companies don’t even realise this is a problem,” says Vatsal.

By 2020, he felt he was ready to take the leap of faith…in himself and his co-founder. “I made the decision on Diwali that year. My family was very supportive, perhaps because I had been badgering them for some years,” he chuckles.

Having identified a problem and worked out the solution, the new co-founders got to work. They decided to focus on finding clients that are public, legacy companies operating in the US and Europe regions. 

“They typically have really large operations, which is where the problem (of scaling cloud storage) is more common and challenging,” says Vatsal. 

“Our five-year vision is to be a unified platform on cloud storage that solves all your infra problems,” Vatsal adds.

Making the Playbook

Initially, finding clients was a two-fold problem. One, companies were largely unaware that cloud storage could be managed more efficiently and at a lower cost. Two, Lucidity had to break into the market outside India without a customer network. For most Indian cross-border companies, this is where the real challenge is when landing big clients.

“We knew this (US market) would be the hardest to crack,” says Nitin, whose core focus is sales. “Neither had I ever been to the US nor done any US enterprise sales. That way, the pandemic opened up a window for us because everyone was doing virtual meetings,” he adds.

The founders had to get creative, and tried several approaches. 

One, they first offered free consultancy services, and later started charging. 

Two, they made the US their first market, i.e., engineering a product-market fit (PMF) for US enterprises instead of creating PMF in India and then selling to the US, explains Nitin.

“For any startup, those first 10 clients are hard to crack. We spent two years on PMF. I was creating the playbook while actually doing sales,” he says, joking that ignorance can be bliss. 

Three, they made direct cold connections via Linkedin, pitching to people they didn’t know. “Our pitch was compelling enough to open some doors. We also sought channel partners because we didn’t have any direct connections, which eventually led to some deals,” he says. 

Nitin isn’t new to the 0 to 1 journey. He had set up two startups, and helped scale a third. His own enterprises – Alitum Solutions, a business management consultancy, and Fungru, a SAAS solution for collecting customer feedback – didn’t work out. However, he had a successful five-year stint at Tracxn, a startup data platform, just before founding Lucidity. Before going down the startup rabbit hole, Nitin had also worked at Dell. 

From his experience, Nitin has learnt that sales needs to be customer-centric. Knowing how to hand-hold a customer who wants to buy your product is important – addressing queries and pain points while making the process simpler. 

“A sales leader tends to focus on demand generation, but should prioritise validation in the early days. As a company, if you don’t have PMF/ product validation in those first two years, it’s time to consider a pivot,” he says. It’s what he did when his startup Fungru didn’t take.

It isn’t the only time he’s pivoted in life. When he started his career after studying engineering, Nitin had followed the natural progression of being a software developer. He understood he wouldn’t make for a  good coder, and switched track. 

“I felt very strongly about B2B software, and understood that in 10-12 years, India would have the potential to create software products and profitable companies. As part of the next generation, I felt I should take more risks,” he says.

A Unified Platform

Three years in, the founders are confident they have a product that works for everyone and doesn’t need customization. Now, growth is about getting in front of as many enterprise customers as possible. 

Currently, about 20% of Lucidity’s clients are Fortune 500 companies. Since early 2024, the startup has seen increasing ACVs across its customers, with one of them paying over $300K in revenue.

Looking ahead, Nitin says, “We’ve moved beyond PMF. We now want to build a couple of more products while also gaining 5X customers. In the coming 18 months, we are looking to build a team that helps us achieve this and more.”

To get there, the company wants to also focus on building their brand through marketing, an avenue that was not aggressively pursued before.

“I wish I could say we did an amazing job at branding (when we started). Now, we’re working towards everyone knowing about Lucidity, especially, infra leaders,” says Vatsal. 

As part of that idea, Lucidity did a brand overhaul, redesigning their logo and website. In fact, it was the company’s in-house designers who asked if they could create a new look and feel, shares Vatsal. “They were after us to redesign the logo because they felt it didn’t fully capture what the company is about,” he adds. 

The founders are big on creating an environment of initiative and support, and want to facilitate building an all-star team.

Nitin, who has weathered three startups and is familiar with the pressures of building a company ground up, says, "We are building for a marathon. So we are cognizant of the impact (a startup can have) on one's mental health. While we want everyone to take their work seriously, we also want the company to be a fun environment for our employees."

“(In a startup) you’re always on the clock. You can’t shut down your mind. So make sure you have a sound support system,” advises Vatsal. For anyone considering starting a venture, he reminds them that it can’t be a short-term bet. “Be prepared for a seven-to-eight year journey, at the very least.”

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