Roast Tank was built on a simple premise: if you can defend your startup in front of comics who have no obligation to be polite, you can survive a VC call. Co-founded by Shivansh Srivastava and Keshav Tayal, this edition brought together Rajat Chauhan and Rakesh Adlakha on the comedy side, with Aditya Singh (Co-founder, All In Capital) and Jivraj Singh Sachar (Founder, ISV) in the investor seats. Founders pitch. Comics roast. VCs deliberate. Funding — or public humiliation — follows.
What separates Roast Tank from a conventional showcase is the audience. With 150+ VCs, angel investors, and founders in the room, every event is one of India’s most efficient networking moments. Deals do not close on stage — they close in the conversations that happen after someone has watched a founder hold their ground under pressure. No deck on email can replicate that.
“Roast Tank exists because entrepreneurship deserves to be celebrated — and sometimes that means surviving a roast first. We built this to support founders in the most human way possible: by putting them in a room that tests more than just their numbers.”
— Shivansh Srivastava, Co-founder, Roast Tank
Why MarkGrid Showed Up
For MarkGrid, the partnership was less about logo placement and more about mission alignment. MarkGrid — India’s AI-native Marketing Economics Platform, built by Two99 — was designed for exactly the kind of brand that walks into Roast Tank: ambitious, early or growth-stage, and operating without the marketing infrastructure their ambitions deserve. The platform replaces 8 to 15 disconnected tools with a single intelligence layer that tracks the full buyer journey, attributes revenue to the right source, and delivers CFO-ready reporting in under three minutes. And it goes deeper than data — MarkGrid also brings neuromarketing into the mix, helping brands understand not just what their customers do, but why they do it: the psychological triggers, emotional cues, and decision-making patterns that sit behind every purchase. In a room full of founders being asked to prove their numbers, that proposition lands with unusual clarity.
“Every founder in that room is being asked to justify their numbers. MarkGrid exists so they have the intelligence to answer that question — not just on stage, but every day after.”
— Agam Chaudhary, Founder, Two99 & MarkGrid
Entrepreneurship, Funded by Laughter
Roast Tank’s model is, at its core, a bet that the Indian startup ecosystem is mature enough to take itself less seriously — and that founders who can handle a comic’s scrutiny are likely the same founders who can handle a market’s. MarkGrid’s partnership with the show extends that logic: the brands and founders best equipped to grow are the ones who can see clearly where they stand, take honest feedback, and move faster than anyone else in the room.
The Story Behind MarkGrid
MarkGrid did not start as a product. It started as a frustration. The team at Two99 spent years watching ambitious brands pour money into marketing they could not measure or defend in a boardroom — not because the data did not exist, but because it was scattered across too many disconnected tools with no way to see the full picture. So they built one platform to replace all of it: 17 AI-powered modules spanning content, attribution, creator intelligence, dark funnel visibility, Search Everywhere Optimisation (SEvO), and CFO-grade reporting. From the first brand signal to the last rupee of revenue, every spend becomes justifiable and every founder walks into their next investor meeting with something more powerful than a pitch: evidence.
Visit markgrid.ai or write to hello@markgrid.ai.
The Story Behind Roast Tank
Shivansh Srivastava and Keshav Tayal did not set out to create a comedy show. They set out to create a better room for founders — one where the feedback was unfiltered, and the audience had the power to change the trajectory of a business. The comedy format was the mechanism: a way to strip away polished pitch rehearsals and get to the founder underneath. What they built is something the Indian startup ecosystem had been quietly asking for: a space where a great idea can get funded and a weak one gets roasted, and both outcomes serve the ecosystem.
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