DECODING ZEME FRESH with PRERNA BHUTANI Prerna has been a part of the Indian start-up ecosystem for the past 13 years now. An entrepreneur multiple times over, and a Venture Capitalist – she has seen both sides of the startup world during this time. After graduating from IIM Lucknow in 2008, she joined the Young Leaders Program at Aditya Birla Group, where she worked for 2 years. But the urge to do something of her own led her to launch her first entrepreneurial venture, India’s first hyperlocal services company - One Call, which helped people manage home services online. Post that, she became a co-founder at Red Quanta, India's leading mystery shopping app, providing retail intelligence to brands & helping them increase customer satisfaction. She then served as a Business Head at CarTrade, where she set up the 'Sell Car' vertical working closely with the dealer community across the country to deliver instant prices to customers wanting to sell their cars. A call from an IIML batchmate one day led her to join IndiaQuotient as a Partner, where she put her start-up experience to use by working with early-stage start-ups. One of the very few women Partners in the Indian VC ecosystem, she was instrumental in creating the consumer brands portfolio at IndiaQuotient, at a time when D2C brands were not a buzzword in investment circles. During her stint, she actively worked on brands like Sugar Cosmetics, FabAlley, Indya, and Giva to name a few. In 2021, she moved out of IndiaQuotient to start her own D2C brand ZeméFresh – a concept that has been very close to her since childhood. Prerna hails from a household where she has seen her mom use only natural, homemade concoctions for hair & skin all her life. So, when she was struggling with her own hair fall issues in her mid-thirties, she naturally went back to her mom’s concoctions of reetha, shikakai & amla. This worked wonders for her hair and reinstated her lost confidence in her hair. Since then, she & her team have been on a mission to make people aware of the power of natural herbs. With ZeméFresh, Prerna is building a new category in the D2C personal care space – that of fresh, pure, kitchen-made formulations to address the needs of modern Indian consumers. Through ZeméFresh, Prerna aims to bring back the trust in natural Indian remedies – something that she has seen first-hand herself.