About the practice
An independent consulting and research practice, based in India and working globally, founded in 2025. The firm is founder-led, the founder working with a team of six analysts, and self-funded, with no external capital and no execution business; research and consulting fees are the only revenue. It works on investment, commercial and strategic decisions wherever the question leads, as individual projects or ongoing relationships, with particular depth in emerging markets and India.
Why the firm exists
Founded 2025 · Based in India · Working globally
The problem, seen from London
Important decisions are too often made from generic research, inherited assumptions, or evidence assembled too far from the decision itself.
Before Kakde Research, the founder worked in London, at a global investment bank and at a financial-data company, across macro and market data. He trained as a computer engineer, took an MSc in Finance, and the data pipelines behind the firm’s work are still built in-house rather than lifted from a vendor summary.
The problem was visible from both seats. Allocations, expansions and board decisions that turned on a specific question were routinely made on research written for everyone and therefore for no one: coverage that was promotional, written to sell a market or a product, or generic, recycled from the same secondary sources the client had already read. The same distance sat between most important decisions and the evidence they rested on, whichever market the decision was about.
Kakde Research was founded in 2025 to put the research back next to the decision. The method that follows is simple to state. Start with the real decision rather than the topic. Identify the alternatives it actually runs between. Follow the evidence across whichever markets the question names, developed anchors included. Go especially deep where the firm’s specialist capability is genuine, which today means emerging markets and India above all. And keep the people doing the research close to the client’s question, from the scoping call to the final review.
The comparative frame runs through all of it. Capital rarely decides whether a market or a company is attractive in isolation; it decides whether it is more attractive than the alternatives competing for the same allocation, the same plant, the same customer. So every conclusion is set against the alternatives the question actually names: a market against the candidates competing for the same allocation, a location against the alternatives for the same plant, a sector view against the anchors an allocator already holds, an emerging market against its peers.
A market conclusion that cannot survive contact with the alternatives is a description, not a finding.
How we work
Consulting · Research · Emerging Markets Desk · India Desk
All four services are available through individual projects and ongoing retained relationships. Consulting and research describe the work; the two desks describe where it goes deepest. Scope and cadence are agreed for each engagement.
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01Project or retainer
Consulting
Research applied to a live decision: which market or opportunity, whether to enter or expand, whether an investment case holds, what a policy turn does to the plan.
How consulting works -
02Project or retainer
Research
A question investigated to institutional standard, as a defined assignment or ongoing research support, and a library of published and private work to read or request.
Research -
03Project or retainer
Emerging Markets Desk
Comparative research across the emerging markets a question names, for a specific EM assignment or a retained specialist relationship.
The Emerging Markets Desk -
04Project or retainer
India Desk
The firm’s deepest single-market capability, read from India, for a specific India assignment or a retained specialist relationship.
The India Desk
Research-led, founder-led and independent
How the firm is built
Research-led
Consulting here starts from research, not from a framework. Every mandate, whether a market comparison, an entry study, a value-chain assessment or a decision memo, is built from sourced series, filings and primary documents, and the deliverable shows the evidence and the reasoning so your own team can check it line by line. The practice does not sell a conclusion. It sells the work that supports one.
Founder-led team
Kakde Research is founder-led. Pranav Kakde scopes every mandate, reviews the work and stays on the client relationship; a team of six analysts assembles, checks and maintains the evidence. The people you speak to are the people doing the work, with no account manager between the scoping conversation and the analysis that follows it. Founder review on every deliverable caps how much the practice takes on at once, and the limit is deliberate: it is what keeps the people who know your context on the work.
Depth in emerging markets and India
The emerging markets are where the comparative frame was built, and India is the firm’s deepest single-market capability: macro, the RBI, fiscal policy, banking and credit, capital flows, corporate earnings, ownership, valuation and market structure, read from India and followed continuously. Depth inside the practice, not its boundary.
Across markets
The same discipline runs across whichever markets a question names: the developed-market anchors an allocator already holds, the emerging markets competing with one another for the same capital and plant, and the comparators a decision actually turns on. Indonesia, Vietnam, China, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa appear often because the questions name them often. The comparative frame is the firm-wide capability. India is where it goes deepest, not where it stops.
Independence
No brokerage, no execution, no product distribution, no asset-management incentive and no external capital. No part of the practice has a stake in which way a finding goes.
Source transparency
Every figure can be traced to its origin, with its series, observation date and retrieval date. Where a series has been revised or interrupted, that is recorded rather than smoothed over. Judgement is labelled as judgement, and the conditions that would change a conclusion are stated alongside it.
Independence, in practice
Structure, not assertion
Independence gets claimed on most research websites. Here it is a matter of structure rather than assertion: nothing in the practice pays more when the conclusion goes one way rather than the other.
No products to sell
The practice sells research and consulting and nothing else. There is no fund to market and no product shelf, so no finding has to lean the way a sale would need it to.
No execution business
There is no brokerage or execution arm attached to the work. Nothing here earns from whether you transact, which leaves the answer free to be ‘not yet’, or ‘no’.
No external capital
The practice is self-funded. There is no investor whose interests sit between the question you asked and the answer you get.
One line of revenue
Research and consulting fees are the only revenue. The practice grows only by being right often enough, and open enough about its reasoning, to be trusted with the next question.
The founder
Founder-led. You speak to the people doing the work.
Kakde Research is founder-led. I scope every mandate, review the work and stay on the client relationship; a team of six analysts assembles, checks and maintains the evidence. There is no account manager between you and the analysis.
Where India ranks badly, I say so first — and where another market wins the comparison, that is the finding. That is what makes the favourable findings worth anything. And if I don’t think your question can be answered properly, I will tell you on the scoping call, before you have spent anything.
The longer record, including the London years and the published research, is on the founder page.
Have a decision worth researching?
Bring us the decision, the question or the assumption you need tested. We build the research around it, and tell you plainly, before you have spent anything, if it cannot be answered well. We will get back to you as soon as possible.