While many venture firms seem to only have their eyes on AI these days, Nexus Venture Partners is deliberately splitting its focus on its new $700 million fund.
The company will support AI startups and look for India-focused startups in consumer, fintech and digital infrastructure.
AI has absorbed most of the venture capital raised worldwide and the 20-year-old VC firm also sees artificial intelligence as a defining technological change. But he argues that crowding into a single, overheated category carries its own risks. India’s digital economy provides a counterweight: an expanding market where AI adoption is growing and opportunities remain more diverse.
For the Nexus, this balance is based on its origins. The Delaware-based firm, with offices in Menlo Park, Mumbai and Bangalore, has been operating as a single fund and an integrated US-India team since its inception in 2006.
It backs early-stage software and India-focused startups from the same fund pool. Over time, its cross-border software bets have spanned a range from infrastructure and developer tools to AI agent startups. The US portfolio includes companies such as Postman, Apollo, MinIO, Giga and Firecrawl, which are widely adopted in developer tools and AI infrastructure.
Meanwhile, its India portfolio has expanded into consumer, fintech, logistics and digital infrastructure. Some of its bets there include Zepto, Delhivery, Rapido, Turtlemint and Infra.Market.
“Artificial intelligence is a huge inflection point and we are anchored in it,” Jishnu Bhattacharjee, US managing partner at Nexus Venture Partners, told TechCrunch. “But we also see that many of these AI innovations actually tend to serve the masses better.”
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Nexus manages $3.2 billion of its funds and has invested in more than 130 companies over the years. The company has recorded more than 30 exits to date, including several IPOs, underscoring the depth of its early-stage, long-term approach.
Abhishek Sharma, US managing director of Nexus Venture Partners, told TechCrunch that the company’s sweet spot remains Seed and Series A startups, often starting with checks as small as a few hundred thousand dollars or around $1 million.
Nexus, which operates with an eight-person investment team, launched with a $100 million fund and has maintained its capital size at $700 million since then launch of Fund VII in 2023. It usually increases every 2.5 to 3 years. Bhattacharjee said the reason for keeping the eighth fund the same size was that the firm believes $700 million is the right amount for its early-stage strategy.
“We don’t want to raise money to raise it,” he noted.
Although India’s AI journey is not as advanced as the US in many areas, Nexus believes India could make leaps and bounds in many parts of the AI ecosystem.
Bhattacharjee highlighted the country’s large talent pool, growing digital infrastructure and the demand for local models that support India’s many languages and service needs. This momentum, he said, is pushing Indian startups to build AI applications and agents faster, often over open source tools and emerging domestic AI infrastructure companies.
The partners pointed to Nexus-backed companies such as Zepto and Neysa to demonstrate how AI is shaping up in India. They said Zepto, the e-commerce platform, uses AI extensively in all its operations – from customer support to routing and fulfillment – showing how consumer businesses are becoming deeply embedded in AI. In addition, infrastructure players like Neysa are emerging to address India’s special needs, including AI workloads, local data management and support for the country’s many languages.
Nexus did not share fund metrics. The partners said its funds have generated significant enough returns over the years to largely cover that fund from returning limited partners. The firm’s LP base spans the US, Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Japan.
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