About Foxnut Studios

What Foxnut Studios is

Foxnut Studios is a consulting, games and publishing studio built between Bengaluru and Paris, founded and run by two people: Ameya Sahasrabudhe and Swati Thakur. It advises on growth, marketing, go-to-market and AI enablement, and it earned the right to advise by designing, manufacturing and launching its own products first.

One disambiguation, because the name collides: “foxnut” is also the common English name for makhana, the snack made from Euryale ferox seeds. This page is about Foxnut Studios, the company. The studio takes its name from the seed, for reasons explained below, but has no connection to any food brand or to the similarly named “Foxnut Group”.

The entity facts, in one table:

The name is the foxnut itself, and it was chosen deliberately. The foxnut grows in muddy, murky inland lakes that do not get a second glance from passersby, in one of the most overlooked regions of the world. Despite that, it pushes through: it rises up through the water surface and delivers one of the most nutrient-rich nuts grown anywhere in the world. The founders find that inspiring. To them the foxnut represents success against all odds, irrespective of starting conditions, and, most importantly, delivering outsized impact. That is why they chose the name.

What Foxnut Studios does

Foxnut Studios sells three things: consulting on commercial problems, its own physical games, and publishing services for independent game designers.

Consulting comes first and is the largest vertical. The consulting practice covers growth strategy, marketing, sales and revenue operations, go-to-market strategy, and AI enablement. The practice does not sell AI strategy documents; it builds AI workflows into commercial operations and hands them over running.

Games is the studio’s own products. The first, Cats from Hell, was designed, playtested, manufactured and launched by this studio, and is in its first print run. The games vertical exists because the studio believes shipping its own products is what makes its advice worth paying for.

Publishing takes independent designers’ prototypes to commercially ready games. The publishing vertical offers the same path the studio ran on its own game: factory sourcing, spec sheets, print-run sizing, pricing and retail conversations.

The people, and what they had shipped before advising anyone

Two people run Foxnut Studios, and the same two people do the client work. Neither is new to shipping: between them they have built a travel company that planned tens of thousands of trips, co-built an art-supplies brand manufactured in Nashik and sold worldwide, led marketing at a Paris luxury-tech startup through an LVMH Innovation Award, and designed the studio’s first shipped game.

The full, sourced version of each record lives on their own pages: Ameya Sahasrabudhe’s record and Swati Thakur’s record. This page deliberately does not duplicate them.

What senior-only means in practice

It means Foxnut Studios employs no junior tier on client work, so there is nobody to hand a brief down to. The practitioner you meet in the first conversation is the practitioner who works the brief from kickoff to final deliverable. The studio is structured so that this is the only way it can operate: it limits engagements to what the two founders can give full attention, and brings in named specialists from its network for specific briefs rather than maintaining a headcount it has to justify billing. You pay for the practitioner, not the infrastructure around them.

Where Foxnut Studios is

Bengaluru and Paris. India plus Europe, by design. Europe brings design sensibility, luxury-brand fluency earned inside the Paris ecosystem, and direct access to European markets. India brings execution depth from the highest-velocity startup ecosystems and the manufacturing fluency that comes from actually making physical products there.

The studio has no US office and claims none. When a brief needs a US perspective, it comes through the studio’s network of senior practitioners, which includes people who have run commercial functions at Meta, Google and Amazon.

Why our rates are not what you expect from an India-based studio

Because Foxnut Studios is not an outsourcing shop, and the rate prices the practitioner, not the geography. The assumption behind the question is that an India-based team competes on being cheap. This studio competes on something else: a senior-only model with no junior tier in the delivery, a footprint that is half Paris, and a record of products the founders designed, manufactured and launched with their own capital before advising anyone.

That record is checkable, on the founders’ pages linked above, rather than asserted. And the numbers themselves are published, not negotiated from a guess: the published ranges for each engagement shape state what an engagement costs before anyone gets on a call.

Asked directly, the founders answer in their own words: India produces some of the best engineers and marketers in the world. Set aside the scientific and cultural record of the Indian civilization entirely, and Indians today are still richly educated, globally competitive, and consistently celebrated for their work ethic and commitment. The quality of our work can rival or exceed work produced by anyone, anywhere. If you buy a Ferrari, you pay what the Ferrari is worth and what it can do for you, irrespective of where it was manufactured.

What we will not do

Foxnut Studios will not advise on anything it has not done, or is not willing to do itself. That filter is the studio’s founding rule, and it extends across the expert network rather than stopping at the founders: any brief the studio takes is worked by people who have done the thing before. When a brief fails the filter, or a conflict of interest or budget mismatch makes an honest engagement impossible, it is said in the first conversation rather than the fourth. The criteria, and what the studio says when it declines, are stated in full on how we work, and when we say no.

How to reach us

Email contact@foxnutstudios.com. Say who you are, what company, and what you are working on: one paragraph is enough. There is no RFP process and no pitch deck required, and a senior practitioner, not an intake team, reads the message.

Foxnut Studios works on briefs like this one from Bengaluru and Paris. If you want the shape of that before you talk to anyone, here is the shape of each engagement, and its range.