gradCapital, started by BITS/ IIMA alums launched its second fund with a total fund size of $6M to invest in student startups.
gradCapital believes in students by offering a standard check: $40,000 for 4%, and funded students get to be part of a 4-week cohort in Bangalore where they meet the people who have made a dent in the world previously. Tarun Mehta (Co-founder, Ather Energy), Shashank (Co-founder, Razorpay), Kailash Nadh (CTO, Zerodha) – are some people who have engaged with students in their cohort.
Most companies raise their next round post gC cohort, and follow-on investors include Lightspeed & Rainmatter Capital.
They fund people all year round, get around 3000 applications a year, and fund around 20 a year. Getting in is hard obviously, but it’s worth a shot.
In a statement about the fund launch, Abhishek, Co-founder & CEO said, “We are not in the business of finding and investing in deals, we are in the business of letting students be more ambitious and build a future, despite having a challenging education system. Being a student also has an unfair advantage: building with friends, not being scared of thinking big, and being scrappy/ fast with their project. How many experienced people can do that? It’s a systemic failure when ambitious students aren’t able to take off while in college, and they end up taking a job because of a loan, and become too rational. After which, they are more likely to start a D2C company instead of a quantum computer, and we need more of the latter.”
gradCapital loves funding teams who have started companies from projects, especially science & engineering projects. They launched a grant program – atomic fellowship – where they want to distribute $5,000 grants to students with technical projects that have the potential of becoming companies. It’s supported by Emergent Ventures, which is backed by Peter Thiel. It will be run by Kshitij (Co-founder at Pixxel) and gradCapital.
In 2021, gradCapital was started by 2 friends in the dorm too, at IIMA. Then, gradCapital conducted a cohort of 5 teams to help them get into YC, and Zepto was a part of it. gradCapital then raised a $1M fund to deploy into 18 companies, and the fund is running at ~2x its initial value within 18 months.
