I am thrilled to announce the launch of our new early-stage VC firm - All In Capital. Backed by some of India’s best Tech founders, Global Institutional Investors, Family Offices, and technology executives from Silicon Valley, I am launching this with my partner and co-founder Aditya Singh.
We are a sector-agnostic fund, focused on backing the best pre-seed and seed-stage founders from India, building for India and for the world. We typically invest $100K to $300K in Indian startups in your first round of funding. We then follow that up with doubling down on you through successive funding rounds. Most of our first investments are pre-product and almost all of them are pre-revenue.
Why did we launch All In Capital? 🤔
I have been building products and startups since 2010 when I launched my first company from a BITS Goa hostel room. I launched an EdTech startup immediately after graduating from college, was part of the early team at upGrad, and subsequently ran FirstCheque.vc, a preseed fund through which I backed 100+ Indian startups in their first rounds.
Throughout my journey - I built and sold everything from T-shirts, digital marketing services, educational games, android apps, online learning programs, and a lot more. My customers varied from SMEs, college students, schools, parents, corporate professionals, HR professionals to finally Founders when I become a VC.
Here, for the first time in my life, I realized that I really do care about this particular customer - i.e. the Indian founder. I am obsessed with delivering the best possible experience I can for them - doing whatever I can to help them win. After all, how could I not be?
They energize me like nothing else! ⚡
It's hard to feel pessimistic when you are spending most of your time with founders dreaming up the future. You get to live that future today 😎Technology that just works is the closest we get to magic in real life. 🤖
And like a force of nature, founders are building technologies that are pulling the future into the present while positively shaping the lives of everyday people and creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. Getting a ringside seat to this magic show is an absolute privilege.
There’s just something about backing these (almost) irrationally optimistic underdogs gunning for changing the world that I am a total sucker for and I realized - for the first time in my life, I had “founder-market fit”.
I loved what I did and my customers loved me back too! Besides what better way to make an impact at scale than getting the best Indian founders access to capital and a support network to help them win. ✌️
So I just knew in my bones - this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life and I had to go All In and launch my own fund.
As I prepared to make the jump - my dear friend Aditya, who’s also been investing in early-stage founders (50+ cheques so far!) reached out saying he would love to be a part of this journey. The more I thought about it the more sense it made. He had been a founder too - He cofounded and ran BookMyForex which MakeMyTrip recently acquired. He subsequently served founders at AWS and later at Stride Ventures which he helped build into one of India’s best Venture Debt funds. We had met three years back as we ended up on the cap table of a company we were both investing in and had immediately hit it off. Over the years we stayed in touch, exchanged notes, shared deals, and did a bunch of investments together.
The more time we spent, it became strikingly clear that we both shared the values that mattered to us more than anything else - i.e. to be the first believers in founders and to do right by them - always keeping their interests first. So when I decided to go All In - it just made sense to partner up and do this with Aditya! 🤝
Why the name All In Capital? 🧐
Even though we share this name with a famous American podcast (hat-tip to the besties), and it makes for a funny pun if you are into that kinda thing (ALL IN CAPITAL!!); We really vibed with it because :
🏋️♂️ Every great creation that changed the course of history had a creator who went All In. It is impossible to build something world-changing without being All In with your time, money, efforts, and everything else you have got over very many years. This is the ethos of the founders we back and the name is dedicated to them.
🇮🇳 The In in All In stands for India - our country that has come so far and yet has soo much more to go. We truly believe in the India Tech story. We are likely in the middle of one of the greatest upcycles of wealth creation in human history powered by widespread technological adoption. A rich India is an idea whose time has come.
🦸♂️🦸♀️ The In in All In also stands for the Individual. Great companies and great products are built by individuals or small teams and not by group think. It’s the one man or woman shaking their fist at the status quo, often laughed at for many years - that finally prevails and changes the world forever.
👫👬 All In also stands for our community of All the founders who work with us - devoting their time, network, and capital to helping you succeed. This community of founders includes Farid (Sharechat), Aprameya (Cofounder Koo, TaxiForSure), Vidit and Sanjeev (cofounders of Meesho), Pawan, Jamil, Abhishek (Cofounders of Fashinza), Deepak (Cofounder of Mindtickle), Farooq and Harsh (cofounders of Fynd), Harpreet (Author, Lets Build a Company), Varun Sadana (Cofounder Licious and SuperTails), Srikrishnan (Rocketlane), Pushkar and Sudarshan (Cofounders of Lets Transport) and many more. They help us source startups to invest in, advise us on sectors we are planning to invest in and also generously help support our portfolio companies. If you raise from us, you will likely also raise from atleast some of them and vice versa 😉
More than a VC firm, we operate as a tribe of founders. And every tribe has a flag - which is why we do too 😊
The founding ethos at All In Capital is to find tech founders who are going All In and to go All In on them. This means picking up their phone at 12am, doing our best to help them win and this means just never giving up on them, no matter how good or bad things get.
So head on over to our brand new website here to learn more about us and how to pitch us! If you have just quit your job or planing to quit soon, or you are still in collge - if you are getting ready to go All In on your startup - we can’t wait to hear your story and go All In with you!
✌🏽
Kushal and Aditya