Aviral Bhatnagar Quits VC Firm Venture Highway

Aviral Bhatnagar, who was leading investments in SaaS, consumer and AI sectors at Venture Highway, has quit the VC firm. 

Bhatnagar was also instrumental in managing and building the student venture program in the firm, as per his LinkedIn profile. 

Taking to X, Bhatnagar wrote, “Excited to share that I will be exploring what to do next for the coming decade. Along the way in my brief journey in the Indian VC ecosystem, I had the chance to work with the Venture Highway team. I could write an essay on the team, but posts, unfortunately, have word limits. I will miss the team and the journey ahead. 

“I am going to be closer to family now. I will spend the next few weeks figuring out how I can contribute deeply to India’s ecosystem. It’s exhilarating and scary to leap, but it feels like it is the right time.”

Thanking Venture Highway’s founder Neeraj Arora, Bhatnagar said, “I’m immensely grateful to Neeraj for providing me with this platform to discover my place in the ecosystem. He has supported and championed so many young, unproven people like me.”

It is pertinent to note that in 2018 Bhatnagar launched A Junior VC, a platform which offers insights into India’s entrepreneurial and startup ecosystem.

Bhatnagar’s exit comes three months after it was reported that General Catalyst was discussing to acquire Venture Highway.

In October last year, 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. 

It makes early-stage seed investments in technology companies in India and has an average ticket size of up to $3 Mn.

Lately, the resignation of the VCs has become more pronounced when 2023 churned out to be one of the toughest years for Indian startup VCs and the investor ecosystem. 

For instance, just this month Lightspeed Venture Partners also saw a series of top-level partner exits.  Abhishek Nag stepped down as a partner at its India arm. Meanwhile, another partner at its US fund, Vaibhav Agrawal, also reportedly resigned from the investment firm.

In fact, 2023 witnessed a slew of partner-level departures at the likes of Orios Venture Partners, Venture Highway, Lightbox, Rebright, Lightrock India and Together Fund.