Nexus isn’t going all-in on AI, keeping half of its new $700M fund for India startups

Summary

While many venture firms seem to only have eyes for AI these days, Nexus Venture Partners is deliberately splitting its focus for its new $700 million fund. The firm will back AI startups and seek out India-focused startups in consumer, fintech, and digital infrastructure. AI has soaked up most of the venture capital raised globally and the 20-year-old VC firm also sees AI as a defining technological shift. But it argues crowding into a single, overheated category carries its own risks. India’s digital economy provides a counterbalance: an expanding market where AI adoption is rising and opportunities remain more diverse. For Nexus, that balance is rooted in its origins. The Delaware-headquartered firm, with offices in Menlo Park, Mumbai and Bengaluru, has operated as a single fund and an integrated U.S.–India team since its founding in 2006. It backs early-stage software and India-focused startups from the same pool of capital. Over time, its cross-border software bets have encompassed a range from infrastructure and developer tools to AI agent startups. U.S. portfolio includes companies such as Postman, Apollo, MinIO, Giga, and Firecrawl, which have become widely adopted in developer tooling and AI infrastructure. Meanwhile its India portfolio has broadened across consumer, fintech, logistics, and digital infrastructure. Some of its bets there include Zepto, Delhivery, Rapido, Turtlemint, and Infra.Market “AI is a huge inflection point, and we are anchoring on that,” Jishnu Bhattacharjee, a managing partner at Nexus Venture Partners in the U.S., told TechCrunch in an interview. “But we are also seeing that many of these AI innovations are actually getting used to serve the masses better.” Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 13-15, 2026 Nexus manages $3.2 billion in capital across its funds and has invested in more than 130 companies over the years. The firm has recorded more than 30 exits to date, including several IPOs, underscoring the depth of its early-st...