Siddharth Bafna

Siddharth Bafna is a Partner at Lodha & Co. and heads the firm's Corporate Finance / Investment Banking practice, a role he has held since 2003. Lodha & Co. is a long-established Indian professional-services firm founded in 1941, with offices in Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, New Delhi and Jaipur, serving corporates, banks, insurers and public-sector clients. Within the firm, Bafna leads M&A and private-equity advisory mandates, with a particular emphasis on the retail, consumer and food-and-beverage sectors.

He is a rank-holding Chartered Accountant (CA) and holds an MBA from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University in the United States. His earlier professional experience includes work at Accenture and entrepreneurial/operating exposure in the food space (associated with Jalapeno Foods / The Nutcracker café in Mumbai), which informs his strong focus on consumer and restaurant businesses.

Over his career he has advised on a series of high-profile transactions in the Indian consumer and restaurant industry. He is frequently cited as an expert commentator and conference speaker on consumer and restaurant-sector dealmaking — including appearances at the VCCircle Consumer & Retail Investment Summit and restaurant-industry events — where he has argued that "there will be a lot of opportunities for new restaurant chains to emerge and for the able ones to raise venture capital or private equity."

Beyond his advisory role, he appears on Indian startup-investor databases (e.g., YNOS, startupinvestors.ai) classified as an angel investor in the seed-stage category, and he has held an independent director role at Rishabh Instruments Limited.

• Sector conviction in consumer & food/retail: His clear specialty is the consumer, retail and restaurant/F&B space — the same verticals where he has led the most deals as an advisor.
• Stage: Listed as a seed / early-stage angel investor, while professionally orchestrating later growth-stage PE and M&A rounds.
• What gets a "yes": Based on his stated views, he favors scalable restaurant/consumer concepts run by "able" operators who are positioned to raise institutional venture capital or private equity — i.e., a credible team and a model that can grow into outside capital.
• Geography: India-focused, anchored in Mumbai's consumer and investment-banking ecosystem.