While a lot of venture capital firms are trying to focus for fear of being judged as “not good” at specific things, we are super focused on doing exactly this — keeping our focus wide and pooling our resources together (when appropriate) just around that very investable company,” he added.
The firm will support AI startups and scout for India-focused startups in consumer, fintech, and digital infrastructure.
Most of the venture capital raised worldwide has been siphoned into AI — and the 20-year-old VC firm also views AI as an epochal, defining shift in technology. But it contends that people pack into one, overheated category at their peril. India’s digital economy offers a counterpoint: It is a growing market in which the use of A.I. is increasing, and opportunities are arguably more varied.
Balance, for Nexus, runs in the family. The Delaware firm, with offices in Menlo Park, Mumbai, and Bengaluru has been a single fund and an integrated U.S.–India team since its launch in 2006.
It also invests in early-stage software and India-focused start-ups out of the same pool of money. Over the years, its cross-border software investments have spanned everything from infrastructure and developer tools to AI agent startups. U.S.-based portfolio companies in developer tooling and AI infrastructure including, Postman, Apollo, MinIO, Giga and Firecrawl.
Meanwhile, its India portfolio has expanded across consumer, fintech, logistics and digital infrastructure. Some of its bets there include Zepto, Delhivery, Rapido, Turtlemint and Infra. Market.
“ AI is a massive inflection point, and we are anchoring in that,” Nexus Venture Partners managing partner in the U.S. Jishnu Bhattacharjee told TechCrunch in an interview. “But we are also finding that a lot of these AI innovations are being used to benefit the masses more directly.”
Nexus has about $3.2 billion under management across its funds and has invested in more than 130 companies over the years. The firm has had more than 30 exits to date, with several IPOs; the firm’s deep early-stage, long-horizon strategy is evident in those results.
The firm’s sweet spot, he said, continues to be inception to seed and Series A opportunities — sometimes leading with checks as little as a few hundred thousand dollars or in the neighborhood of $1 million.
Nexus — which runs with an eight-person investment team — started at a size of $100 million and has kept its fund size consistent, at $700 million, ever since raising Fund VII in 2023. It generally goes up every 2.5 to 3 years.” The reason for keeping the eighth fund at $700 million, Bhattacharjee said, is that the venture firm feels it is the appropriate amount for its early-stage strategy.
“We don’t want money for the sake of raising,” he said.
While in many areas India’s AI journey is not as advanced as the U.S., Nexus contends that India has the opportunity to leapfrog in a number of components of the AI ecosystem.
Bhattacharjee emphasized the country’s rich talent pool, growing digital infrastructure and need for localized models they can use to service India’s vast number of languages and service requirements. These forces, he said, are driving Indian startups to develop AI applications and agents more quickly — often on top of open source tools and emerging domestic AI infrastructure companies.
The partners cited companies like Zepto and Neysa which are backed by Nexus as an indication of how AI is forming in India. They also suggested that Zepto, the quick-commerce platform, employs AI throughout its operations, from customer support to routing and fulfillment, illustrating how consumer businesses are becoming very AI-native.
Meanwhile, infrastructure players like Neysa are beginning to crop up to meet India-specific requirements, including sovereign AI workloads, enabling localized data handling and support for the country’s numerous languages.
Nexus did not disclose fund metrics. Its returns have been strong enough over the years that its funds have mostly refilled this fund from limited partners returning. The firm’s LPs cover the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Japan.
