India’s First Operator-Led VC, Together Fund To Build ‘The Next 30 Olympic Champions In (SaaS) Startups’

• BySheetal Sidhu     |    July 28, 2021

“Our success is in finding the next 30 Olympic champions in startups.” Girish Mathrubootham, co-founder of Freshworks, uses the ongoing Olympic Games as a metaphor to highlight the ambitions of his newly launched venture capital fund called Together Fund. The fund will mostly invest in homegrown startups in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) space as well as a few that provide new-age software services in consumer-facing sectors such as edtech and fintech. The choice of sectors isn’t a surprise considering Girish’s partners in the fund are Manav Garg, founder of Eka Software, and Shubham Gupta, who was leading SaaS deals at venture capital firm Matrix Partners India until last year, and Avinash Raghava, Founding Volunteer at SaaSBOOMi and Co-Founder of iSPIRT.

The main currency of investment, they explain, will be time and mentorship for budding founders, and not merely money in startups, and the partners in the fund will span the entire startup ecosystem.  “You can call it as India’s first operator-led VC,” says Girish. Besides the four partners, these ‘operators,’ explains Manav, will include not just founders but also functional specialists such as product and marketing experts, as well as the peer founder community. It will, of course, also include VC firms. “We are taking the entire ecosystem together, be it the founders who want to invest through time and money, be it the VCs who want to participate and take our help in whatever they want to get. As it’s said, it takes a village to create a company,” says Manav.  Subham says more than 150 executives and operators from the U.S., Singapore, and South Asia, essentially India, have expressed interest in signing up.

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