The Fund Launches in India!
The Fund is a founder community and early stage fund, by founders for founders.
We are excited to announce the launch of The Fund India, an early stage VC fund investing across the Indian early stage ecosystem, powered by a community of founders and operators based in India and around the world. We look forward to working closely with the fast growing ecosystem to bring our early stage, founder-centric, global community approach that can add value at the earliest stage of a company’s life.
Community driven venture capital is today’s angel investing frontier. Angel investing has historically been limited to exclusive clubs of highly connected, wealthy founders and executives. Founders around the globe know what business models are working, and it’s their access to peer networks that set them apart in this geographic arbitrage.
Today, investment platforms like AngelList that facilitate smaller check sizes for accredited investors make it easier than ever for new investors from around the world to plug into the entrepreneurial ecosystem and gain access to some of the best companies in India being sourced by our founder community. India is in the early days of the broader public being able to access and invest in some of the hottest companies reshaping the sub-continent.
Despite the many breakout success stories of Indian tech, a majority of the angel investors in these companies remain highly concentrated, giving founders less diversity of viewpoints to rely on for making key decisions. The Fund India aims to unify these collectives of value-add investors and bring them together into a community that connects founders and operators across India and the world and others with ties or passion for the market who are excited to participate in the India growth story.
The Fund India’s Partners includes long time Googler, Saurabh Goyal, Babajob co-founder and currently with Indeed, Vir Kashyap, and Lybrate founder and CEO, Saurabh Arora. Investors in the fund include: Radhika Ghai currently CEO of Kindlife and previously co-founder of one of India’s earliest unicorns, Shopclues; Ritesh Mehta, early at Facebook and currently Founder & COO - stckme; Sweta Rau, Founder of White Ventures; Praveen Sharma, CEO of PayTM Payments Services; among several other entrepreneurs and executives.
The Fund India charts a new frontier for investing into the earliest stage of Indian high growth tech startups sourced by the most capable entrepreneurs and founders from across the Indian diaspora. We harness the power of community around a fund structure for pre-seed and seed stage investments so we can bring our LPs into the biggest opportunities in Indian tech:
A community of Member LPs invest and bring extensive operational experience as former and current founders and operators across the Indian ecosystem
Member LPs bring both capital and resources to Indian entrepreneurs, with an ability to connect founders not only within India but to the broader global investment community.
The Fund India is one of ten funds in The Fund family, meaning that our founders and operators are connected to over 500 others across the globe. Our founders have raised money from nearly every fund in the US and Europe, and we create an opportunity onramp for Indian early stage startups who want to expand their global reach for partnerships, recruiting and fundraising.
If you are an India based, or India associated, founder and CEO building a tech-enabled business and you are looking to raise a pre-seed or seed round (or know of someone we should meet), we want to hear from you! Please contact us here.
See our announcement in Tech in Asia!
If you are a woman with a founder or operator background looking to be an investing partner, please reach out to j@thefund.vc