Sugar Free Capital raises $32M inaugural fund to back early-staged MIT founders

Summary

Sheena Jindal is from Boston. She grew up there, attended MIT, and worked at the Boston Consulting Group for several years. She launched a startup, worked at a startup, and then became an investor at Bessemer and Comcast Ventures (CV). Last year, her worlds collided when she decided to launch her own fund, Sugar Free Capital, a firm that focuses on investing in technical founders from MIT. She nabbed LPs, including the family offices of heavy-hitting tech executives from companies like Nvidia and Citadel, and on Monday announced the closing of Sugar Free’s $32 million inaugural fund. One premise of the fund is found in the name. While working at CV, she led dozens of deals but found herself dismayed at the sky-high valuations of the 2021 era. She kept referring to investment opportunities as being “too sugary, in the sense that valuations were too high,” she told TechCrunch. From there, she started thinking about the innovation of the past few years and how it was focused on optimization. “But we are really entering the age of intelligence,” she said. She designed a thesis around the idea that capturing the age of intelligence would require two things: technical founders, predominantly those with a “systems engineering mindset,” which is what MIT brings, she added, and concentration. “The data have shown us historically that venture returns are concentrated among a select group of winners.” The focus on MIT also has another reason. Unlike Harvard and Stanford, there isn’t a big class of MIT alumni who are early-stage investors, even though MIT founders often go on to start and work at lucrative companies. “MIT folks go into finance, but they go into more quantitative roles,” she said — more hedge fund and late-stage investing. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025 That white space gives Jindal, a rare solo woman GP, an outsized opportunity. She plans to invest in 15 early-staged companies (she’s already backed four), writing checks that range from $1 ...