Jul 07, 2026 1:39pm IST
Creative Agency BTG Finds a New Home With Nikhil Kamath’s WTF
Founding teams are often described as being "on the same page." BTG's founders are not. They challenge each other constantly, laugh easily, disagree without ceremony, and seem remarkably comfortable letting the best idea win. It makes for chaotic conversation but, as it turns out, a very interesting company.
BTG Studios (By The Gram), one of India's most distinctive independent creative agencies and newly acquired by Nikhil Kamath’s WTF, did not begin with much. In 2018, Aaliya Amrin, Eman Batliwalla and Danisha Kohli decided to band together. “It was a happy mistake that turned out to be extremely good timing,” Kohli says. It was a year of seismic shifts in the brand world. Global disruptors — Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, IKEA, Bumble, Soho House were entering India simultaneously. Luxury content was proliferating. Brands were restless, hungry for agencies that understood them and signaled their break from the template. Traditional agencies had not caught up. BTG walked into that gap and made it their address.
Batliwalla says, "We spoke their language and didn't follow the traditional agency model, the laborious red tape, the billable hours nonsense. If we'd been too structured at the start, we'd have ended up with a cookie-cutter business. We needed to constantly challenge ourselves, keep an edge." “What might have appeared to others as different opportunities felt like a singular one to us. We specialized in understanding that overlap and doubling down at the intersection,” says Kohli.
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Their early wins reflect exactly this instinct. Filmmaker Zoya Akhtar took a punt on them to build the identity for her production company, Tiger Baby. The Netflix account followed. Both were proof that BTG had seen something others hadn't thought to look for.
Three women in their twenties running a company were bound to attract attention. Amrin says, “I never wanted BTG's story to be anchored in the female founders' narrative. But shockingly, in most big pitches, we are made acutely aware of our gender. Circumventing the over-forty, grey-haired male counterpart that we unfailingly go up against — despite having the better pitch and a stronger portfolio — is something we have had to learn.”
Batliwalla shares, “In the advertising business, it still matters to come across as a seasoned, grey-haired, over-forty male. We expected it to some degree. We didn't know how prevalent it was." Kohli adds, "It did not get better. We made it better. We decided to revel in the bubble we'd created. Over time, we circumvented gatekeeping by leaning into it.”
The pandemic arrived like a hard stop to all that momentum. The years that followed were no gentler. Batliwalla says, “We had to constantly align around staying lean — under 50 full-time employees. As long as we were growing and managing, we kept adapting to stay ahead of the industry. Of course, there were phases where we wondered: did we even make any money this year?”
BTG survived eight years in a cutthroat market because it refused to mistake speed for scale, or size for success. It prioritized specialization, curated its collaborators and protected its cultural ethos. They knew the right acquisition partner would come. Nikhil Kamath was the missing piece. Batliwalla says, “We understood what he was doing and where he was heading without speaking much to him or his team. We saw the synergies. We needed someone with a similar vision — someone a bit more current.”
Kohli adds, “There's no one else building culture, brand, and community in the same way. He understood that India is missing a creative company of this kind, and he wanted partners to build that future together.”
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