Politixia
Eight years ago, Eman Batliwalla and Danisha Kohli were doing the thing every good business idea starts as: noticing something obvious that somehow nobody else in the room had bothered to act on. Global platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Bumble were arriving in India with a specific, slightly awkward problem: how do you market something international without it feeling like it was airdropped in from Los Angeles?
Along with third co-founder Aaliya Amrin, they built BTG to answer that question, with no institutional funding, no safety net, and presumably a fair amount of nerve. Their first real break was a Netflix campaign for White Tiger, the job of introducing an international production starring Priyanka Chopra to an Indian audience without either side feeling like an afterthought.
This week, that eight-year wager paid off in a way most services businesses in India rarely get to enjoy in public. BTG has joined Nikhil Kamath’s WTF ecosystem, becoming only the second creative agency in the portfolio after One Hand Clap. In conversation with Storyboard18, the founders were refreshingly unbothered about dressing up what actually happened. WTF has taken a majority stake, they confirmed plainly, no euphemisms deployed. And yet they are adamant it still functions as a partnership, not a takeover with better PR. That distinction, they said, was non-negotiable going in: someone who understood them, let them keep creative control, and offered a global stage rather than a global cage. Kamath, in their telling, was simply the obvious answer.
They describe him as unexpectedly easy-going for a man this scrutinised, and the wider WTF ecosystem as something that behaves less like a portfolio of assets and more like a peer group that occasionally invoices each other. That trust, they say, is precisely why they are not losing sleep over creative control on future client work, a claim founders often make right before losing exactly that.
What actually changes now is scale, not identity. BTG has already added an experiential wing and is pushing further into markets outside India, building on teams already running out of London, Los Angeles and Dubai. The ambition, as they put it, is to prove that creative companies out of India can build iconic brands on the global stage themselves, rather than being the reliable local hands that execute someone else’s.
But the most honest part of the conversation had nothing to do with deal structure. Both founders kept returning to how much patience the last eight years had actually demanded, considerably more than either had budgeted for at the start. One line stood out, delivered with the casualness of something said many times before: you must be a little delusional to choose this every single day. It is a rare thing to hear mid-announcement, when the instinct is usually to perform certainty rather than admit to it. Which is exactly why this deal is worth paying attention to. Not because a services business finally landed institutional money, that happens weekly. But because two women built something real enough that a founder as picked-apart as Kamath wanted in, and wanted in on their terms.
Also Read: BTG joins Nikhil Kamath’s WTF ecosystem, retains independence in strategic growth partnership
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