The Deal Room: An Insider's Guide to Investment Banking in India

About The Book

Every deal has a room. No textbook takes you inside it.
The Deal Room does.
Two decades at the Indian deal table, written down. Not Wall Street — the mid-market, where promoter-led family businesses raise their first institutional capital and a handful of people in a boutique firm do the real work.
How a mandate is won, and how it is lost. What a lender wants that a private equity fund ignores. Which clause is always fought over. How an information memorandum gets read rather than skimmed. Why a deal dies three days from closing.
Structured debt, private equity, M&A, valuation, financial modelling, cap tables — taught through worked Indian examples, with FEMA and the SEBI takeover code built into the pages, not bolted on.
Plus the toolkit: a sample engagement letter, equity and debt term sheets, a teaser and IM template, a model skeleton.
And the part no syllabus carries — the judgement, temperament and relationships that separate a good banker from a great one.
If Indian investment banking is where you are headed, start here.

About The Author

Abhishek Gupta is the Founding Partner of Bluford Capital, a Hyderabad-headquartered boutique investment banking and transaction advisory firm, trusted by promoter-led businesses across India with their most consequential capital decisions. His practice spans structured debt, private equity and venture capital, M&A advisory and valuation advisory. An engineer turned dealmaker, he holds a B.Tech from IIT Roorkee and an MBA from IIT Kharagpur. Over more than two decades he has worked at a top private bank, a Big 4 firm and a boutique investment banking firm, before building Bluford Capital from the ground up. Having worked inside large institutions and then as a founder, he writes with the candour of a practitioner, not a commentator.
His path was unusual. He began by winning mandates and learned execution afterwards, the reverse of the usual order. That instinct for reading people and opportunity, alongside rigorous technical craft, runs through every chapter of this book. Beyond the boardroom, he is a singer, a practising Vedic astrologer, a devoted movie buff and a numismatist with a large coin collection. He lives in Hyderabad with his wife, Veena, and their daughter, Aparajita, a Western vocal singer. He wrote The Deal Room to pass the craft on to the next generation.