Aviral Bhatnagar Floats VC Firm AJVC To Back Pre-Seed Startups

SUMMARY

Bhatnagar identified a significant gap in India's pre-seed ecosystem, where many founders struggle to raise their first round of funding

AJVC’s first fund received SEBI approval last week

Bhatnagar joins a long list of fund managers and partners who have left VC firms over the past year to launch their own ventures

Aviral Bhatnagar, former lead investor in SaaS, consumer, and AI sectors at Venture Highway, has launched a new venture capital fund called AJVC, which will focus on pre-seed investments.

Bhatnagar, who left the VC firm in April, identified a significant gap in India’s pre-seed ecosystem, where many founders struggle to raise their first round of funding. He highlighted that it often takes over 20 investors to secure just INR 1 Cr, leading many promising startups to abandon their dreams at the earliest stage.

“I want to solve this problem through a fast, approachable, pre-seed firm for Indian startups. The aim is to build a founder-friendly institution. AJVC’s first fund received SEBI approval last week. The fund is largely committed on launch day itself. I aim to bring the decade-long learnings as an investor supporting startups to build AJVC,” Bhatnagar said in a Linkedln post.

Earlier this year, US-based venture capital firm General Catalyst announced its merger with Delhi NCR-based early stage investment firm Venture Highway to expand its presence in India.

Prior to Bhatnagar’s exitI, Samir Sood, cofounder of Venture Highway resigned from his position as a partner at the VC firm several months ago. Venture Highway, which was founded in 2015 by Sood and Arora, counts unicorns such as Meesho, CRED and Moglix, among others in its portfolio.

Bhatnagar joins a long list of fund managers and partners who have left VC firms over the past year to launch their own ventures.

Last month, former Premji Invest partner Atul Gupta launched a venture capital firm Trident Growth Partners (India) to invest in startups operating across consumer, financial services, enterprise software and technology, industrial and manufacturing and healthcare sectors.

Earlier in April, Piyush Gupta quit Peak XV to launch a secondary-focused fund. The same month, Lightspeed saw the exit of venture partners Vaibhav Agrawal and Abhishek Nag.

In April, Sameer Brij Verma stepped down as managing director of Nexus Venture Partners in March to launch a multi-stage fund.