Garuda Ventures' New $31M Fund
A bit of what I've been working on!
Over the last 14 years, I’ve had the immense privilege of working with founders and their startups. First as an investor at Scale Venture Partners and Matrix Partners, then as an early employee and executive at Poynt and Legion. Each time, I had the same realization: I love working with founders to help pull their visions of the future into the present.
This is why I’m so excited to finally share the news that Arpan and I have raised $31M for Garuda Ventures’ debut institutional fund. I'm incredibly grateful we’ve reached this milestone because it means I get to keep partnering with brilliant founders as they start their entrepreneurial journeys!
We wrote a short post on our new fund on the Garuda Ventures Substack that I am including below. Much more to come on this from me! Thank you for reading and for your support!
We started Garuda Ventures in 2018 with a simple goal: support exceptional founders with advice, introductions, and capital. It began as a part-time passion project, where we met with founders to offer perspective and brainstorm ways to grow, all rooted in our experience building companies. Through that $3 million proof-of-concept fund, we were fortunate to partner with 32 incredible founding teams as they were getting started on their journeys.
As it turns out, it was also the start of our own.
Today, we are thrilled to formally announce the next chapter in the Garuda Ventures story, with our $31 million debut institutional fund. Our goal is the same: support exceptional founders and go all-in to help them build world-class products, teams, and companies.
First to Believe
We partner with founders as they are just getting started. Call the stage what you will – inception stage, -1 to zero, zero to 1, pre-seed, seed – we want to join the journey as the first institutional investor with up to $1 million initial investment. We get to conviction ourselves, don’t ask “Who else is in?”, and take a hands-on approach to supporting our teams.
We are focused on four core themes: Intelligent Applications, Commerce Infrastructure, The New Perimeter, and Climate 2.0. These are all categories we have spent time building and scaling businesses in as operators and investors at leading software companies including Okta, Poynt, Canva, and Legion. These sectors are where we have the deepest networks and the strongest ability to improve the odds of a company’s success.
The “How” Matters
We believe operating excellence is the difference not just between failure and success, but between a great company and a category-defining one. Now more than ever, investors who have built from the ground-up and have experienced best-in-class firsthand are ideally suited to help founders overcome the many obstacles they’ll face. We are excited to bring our lived experience, network of top-tier founders and operators across all business functions (many of whom we count as LPs and advisors), and hard-earned learnings to bear as we support founders in going further, faster.
As operators at fast-growing companies, we have seen up close how difficult it is for founders to manage the uncertainty and isolating nature of the job. And so we aim to partner with empathy, candor, and without judgment. We want to earn the right to be that sounding board, to talk through the half-baked idea, and help arrive at the best decision before quickly moving on to the next. We owe it to founders to be responsive, offer constructive feedback, and provide high-value introductions whether or not we invest. Founders carry not only their visions of the future and how to improve it, but the aspirations of everyone involved in making that future a reality, including their employees, customers, and families. To the founders we meet as we build this firm, we make this promise: we will never reduce you to an entry in a CRM.
With Gratitude
The relationship between a founder and their earliest investors is a singular and special one, unlike any the founder will have with others who join the journey along the way. It is a bond forged amidst extreme uncertainty for both sides, and, when it works, can be the beginning of a decades-long partnership. We recognize what a privilege it is to do this job and are grateful for the opportunity to be building our firm brick by brick alongside the founders we back.
Our heartfelt thanks goes out to everyone who has helped us get to this point: the founding teams that we have been fortunate to partner with already, the LPs who have trusted us with their capital, the teams at Scale Venture Partners, Matrix Partners, Okta, Poynt, and Legion who trained and mentored us, our peers and collaborators in the VC community who provided advice and guidance, and the countless others who have influenced us and our thinking over the last 15+ years. And most importantly, thank you to our families who continue to ground and support us.
Looking Ahead
As we embark on this new and exciting phase of building Garuda, we’re always looking to meet exceptional founders who are just starting off on their own journeys. If you're one of those founders, drop us a note at hi@garuda.vc. We look forward to meeting you!
Congratulations Rishi and Arpan, so well deserved!