While many enterprise firms appear to be focusing solely on AI lately, Partners of the Nexus enterprise is deliberately splitting targets across its new $700 million fund.
The company will support AI startups and hunt down India-focused startups in the consumer infrastructure, fintech and digital sectors.
I have absorbed most of the enterprise capital raised around the world and the 20-year-old VC firm also sees AI as a defining technology shift. But he argues that clustering in one overheated category carries risks. India’s digital economy provides a counterbalance: a growing market where the use of artificial intelligence is growing and opportunities remain more diverse.
In the case of Nexus, this balance is rooted in the roots. Headquartered in Delaware with offices in Menlo Park, Mumbai and Bengaluru, the firm has operated as a single fund and integrated U.S.-India team since its founding in 2006.
It supports early-stage software and startups focused in India from the same pool of capital. Over time, its cross-border software investments have spanned a wide selection of products, from infrastructure and software tools to AI agent startups. The US portfolio includes corporations comparable to Postman, Apollo, MinIO, Giga and Firecrawl, which have been widely adopted in AI development tools and infrastructure.
Meanwhile, its portfolio in India has expanded to incorporate consumer infrastructure, fintech, logistics and digital infrastructure. Some of its establishments include Zepto, Delhivery, Rapido, Turtlemint and Infra.Market
“Artificial intelligence is a huge inflection point and that is what we are focused on,” Jishnu Bhattacharjee, managing partner at Nexus Venture Partners in the US, told TechCrunch in an interview. “But we also see a lot of these AI innovations actually catching on to better serve the masses.”
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Nexus manages $3.2 billion in funds and has invested in over 130 corporations over the years. The company has seen over 30 exits to this point, including several IPOs, underscoring the depth of its long-term, early-stage approach.
Abhishek Sharma, managing partner at Nexus Venture Partners in the US, told TechCrunch that the sweet spot for a company is to originate a Series A, often starting with checks of just a few hundred thousand dollars or around $1 million.
Nexus, which operates with an eight-person investment team, began with a $100 million fund and has since maintained its fund size at $700 million. launch of Fund VII in 2023. It normally increases every 2.5 to three years. Bhattacharjee said the reason for keeping an eighth fund of the same size is because the company believes $700 million is the correct quantity for its early-stage strategy.
“We don’t want to collect money for the sake of collecting money,” he noted.
While India’s AI journey is not as advanced in many areas as the US, Nexus believes India can leapfrog in several parts of the AI ecosystem.
Bhattacharjee highlighted the country’s large talent pool, growing digital infrastructure and the need for localized models that support India’s multiple languages and service needs. He said this dynamic is forcing Indian startups to build AI applications and agents faster, often relying on open source tools and emerging domestic AI infrastructure corporations.
Partners highlighted Nexus-backed corporations comparable to Zepto and Neysa for example how AI is taking shape in India. They said Zepto, a high-speed trading platform, is making extensive use of AI in its operations – from customer support to routing and order achievement – which shows how consumer businesses are becoming heavily AI-driven. Additionally, infrastructure players like Neysa are emerging to deal with India’s specific needs, including sovereign AI workloads, local data handling, and multi-language support in the country.
Nexus did not provide fund metrics. The partners said his funds had generated enough significant returns over the years to largely fill the fund with returning limited partners. The company’s LP database covers the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Japan.