Aviral Bhatnagar

I’m excited to announce the beginning of my journey as the founder of AJVC, the VC fund AJVC’s goal has always been to support Indian entrepreneurship. With capital, we are now transforming into an enabler of entrepreneurship. Over the last decade of early-stage investing, I noticed a growing gap in India’s pre-seed ecosystem. Founders struggled to raise their first round, giving up their dreams at stage 0. In many cases, more than 20 investors were required to raise 1 Cr. Few Indian companies get a lot of capital; many don’t get any. 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. I have been overwhelmed by the support AJVC has received in such a short period. Many of our supporters quote the connection with my conviction-driven opinions since 2018 I didn’t share the opinions with the goal of building a firm. The goal was to help people at scale, share insights, detail learnings from my experiences. But the impact of analysis of startups/business continues to surprise me. Many of the fund’s big supporters have been reading AJVC for years. Founders whom I plan to support through the fund are connected via LinkedIn/Twitter. The openness of AJVC was a big factor. I had never imagined a passion project could evolve into this. But here we are, at the cusp of a huge decade for Indian entrepreneurship. The last decade was of building maturity. Iconic exits, tech IPOs becoming real, profitability becoming a focus. India now has 10+ tech public cos, 100+ unicorns, 10K+ startups each year, $20B of annualised funding, and 1M+ startup employees. We are in a period of quiet, consolidation, and re-focus usually followed by a long period of growth. If you’re building a startup today it’s a great time My journey as a founder has been one of revelations. My already high respect for founders has only increased after I started my journey. You can go from being on top of the world one day to in the doldrums the next. But nothing beats the experience of building something of your own. I couldn’t have got here without the support of people along my journey My two alma maters and the friends I made opened my worldview. All of you on LinkedIn have been kind, supportive and a big motivation. Learnings from my previous teammates and bosses have shaped me. The AJVC team has volunteered over years and has supported hugely - including AJVC’s fresh new website in my bio. I don’t think any of this would have been possible without the support of my family. My family forms the foundation on which I take this leap If you’re taking the leap to start, apply on the website - you, AJVC and India are just getting started

OpenAI's business development teams are extremely impressive Went into great detail with our now 40+ portfolio group, and is individually spending hours trying to help our AI companies Reminds me of how AWS developed immense depth in India with help + credits for startups

China's tech-heavy Star50 index is down 40% in 3 months - Unitree Robotics down 50% since listing - MetaX Circuits down 50% since July - Zhongji Innolight down 60% since June All expected tremendous AI powered growth which hasn't materialized Harbinger of what's coming

Anthropic has compute commitments of $550B till 2030 To simply cover that, Anthropic needs to scale from $5B in 2025 to $150B+ in 2030 From founding, Anthropic will need to do in 8 years what Meta/Alphabet/Amazon took 20 years to do Generational execution necessary

India's top 5 IT companies have generated total net profit of 10L Cr or $125B since 2015, of which $100B was given in dividends Anthropic has raised $140B in the same time frame, with India's IT majors giving dividends instead at that scale We could have made a serious AI lab

When you believe Manchester United has reached the bottom they surprise you again At this point it is unclear if anything can fix this likely 13 year decline from greatness Feels like its better we get relegated to wake everyone up

ajvc's portfolio crossed 100 Cr annualized in September 2026 Jan 25 was the first month 4 of our companies generated revenue for a combined ~13L Fulfilling to see so many of them go from zero to product, product to first revenue, and then to 1 Cr / month

Over time you eventually realize that the greatest wealth you can have comes from having purpose

~15 of 800+ IITB batchmates and ~10 of ~400+ IIMA batchmates are entrepreneurs While I think the risk may not be worth it compared to available options, I think more of us need to take it Needs to be greater use of the safety net we have, to be job creators and not seekers

The longer you study, the lesser is your likelihood to get a job Quite insane that education and employment now has an inverse relationship, which now inverts the oft repeated phrase पढ़ोगे लिखोगे बनोगे खराब, खेलोगे कूदोगे बनोगे नवाब

To benchmark how seriously distressed CoreWeave's credit is, Lehman had a 702 basis points credit spread 1 day before it went bankrupt Investors effectively needs $1M to insure $10M of debt, 2.5x of what it did just 4 months ago Needs to execute extremely well to simply survive

Einstein published general relativity in 1915 GPS which is a widespread application benefiting greatly from GR had full operational capability in 1995, 80 years later Even if Anthropic compresses major scientific discovery into one year, economic growth will take decades

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results" - Rita Brown on Manchester United fans