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We help entrepreneurs build generational companies

About Us

We are committed to being the first and most active VC partner to founders

Why Us

We back contrarian founders and consistently spot opportunities before they become obvious to others

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Why Us

Our eclectic networks help us partner with pioneering global product teams from India

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Responsible Investing at WaterBridge Ventures

We are a signatory to the Principles for Investors in Inclusive Finance (PIIF) – a responsible investment framework housed within the PRI initiative for investors focused on expanding access to affordable and responsible financial products and services to those traditionally excluded

Our Founders & Portfolio

Our Team

We have 40 years of combined investing experience

News & Insights

Beating Our Biases Part I – To Finish First, One Need Not Start First

November, 2024

India’s Burgeoning Middle Class is Reshaping the Travel Narrative

November, 2024

Beyond the Top 25 Cities, India’s 400+ Towns Present a $200B Consumer Opportunity

November, 2024

  • portfolio News

Eloelo records 5X growth in ARPPU in 5 months and doubles user base to cross 85M users; tops Entertainment chart

  • November, 2024

  • portfolio News

Tejas derisking India’s SMEs from $15B in annual losses, with BimaKavach

  • October, 2024

  • portfolio News

Fairdeal crosses 10K orders within 4 months of inception

  • October, 2024

  • portfolio News

Magicpin hits 150K daily orders; captures 10% market share for food; expects $100M annual revenue run rate

  • October, 2024

  • portfolio News

Adster files its first US patent application with USPTO

  • October, 2024

  • fund News

Manish co-chairs the Capital and Investment Summit 2024, by Entrepreneur India

  • October, 2024

  • fund News

WaterBridge hosts Chief of Staff Roundtable

  • September, 2024

  • portfolio News

Vinayak, Siddharth & Chaitanya on the 2024 Hurun India Under35s list

  • September, 2024

  • fund News

Manish Kheterpal moderates the event ‘Bharat Vapsi: Navigating Regulatory and Investment Landscapes’, by IVCA

  • September, 2024

  • fund News

WBV joins 2X Global membership

  • August, 2024

  • portfolio News

Rahul and Nikhil reshaping rural finance with gold loans from Yellow Metal

  • August, 2024

  • portfolio News

Atlan Named a Leader in the Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Data Catalogs for Data Ops Q3 2024

  • August, 2024

  • fund News

Manish Kheterpal named as the Vice Chair in IVCA’s VC Council for 2024-26

  • August, 2024

  • portfolio News

BimaKavach named Future Generali’s Top Premium Broker

  • July, 2024

  • portfolio News

Tanushree and Aditya on Serving the Forgotten India, with Doubtnut

  • July, 2024

  • LinkedIn

  • portfolio News

Eloelo Tops Chart in Entertainment on Google Play, Ahead of Disney+ Hotstar, Jio Cinema & Prime Video

  • July, 2024

  • LinkedIn

  • portfolio News

Chalo Wins ₹215 Cr Contract to Operate Nagpur’s Aapli Public Bus Service

  • July, 2024

  • Times of India

  • fund News

Manish Kheterpal on Venture Capital Key Trends with CNBC TV-18

  • July, 2024

  • YouTube

  • portfolio News

Magicpin enables KFC’s ONDC foray

  • July, 2024

  • portfolio News

Trampoline Raises $5M in Seed Funding

  • June, 2024

  • portfolio News

Atlan Raises $105M in Series C funding

  • May, 2024

  • portfolio News

Ankit Alok Bagaria and Abhi Gawri (co-founders of Loopworm) featured in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia

  • May, 2024

Investing in AI for Synthetic Biology

May, 2024

Investing in Generative AI

May, 2024

Why We Invested in Adster

April, 2024

  • fund News

Manish Kheterpal as a panelist at the GPC Conference in New York

  • March, 2024

  • LinkedIn

  • fund News

WaterBridge Ventures Conclave 2024

  • March, 2024

Investing in Carbon Markets

February, 2024

WBV Insights: Investing in Semiconductor Designing

February, 2024

  • fund News

That One Idea – Season 3

  • February, 2024

  • fund News

Anjali Sosale speaks at WeWork India Jumpstart 2024

  • January, 2024

  • LinkedIn

  • portfolio fund News

Adster joins the WaterBridge Family

  • January, 2024

  • LinkedIn

  • fund News

Women In Investing Mixer

  • January, 2024

  • fund News

Manish Kheterpal featured as a panelist at AVCJ Forum in Hong Kong

  • December, 2023

  • portfolio News

WaterBridge Ventures leads a $2M round for Fairdeal, a retail intelligence platform

  • November, 2023

  • portfolio News

Eloelo, India’s leading live entertainment and social gaming platform, has raised $22 Million in its Pre-Series B round

  • September, 2023

  • portfolio News

A milestone four generations in the making: BimaKavach secures its Direct Insurance Broking License

  • September, 2023

  • fund News

Anjali Sosale speaks at The Product Folks’ Product (Un)Conference 2023

  • August, 2023

  • fund News

Manish Kheterpal spearheads the Mumbai and Benguluru edition of #VC101 conducted by IVCA

  • July, 2023

  • fund News

FastForward VC Partners Meet

  • July, 2023

Easy to Plug In Hard to Plug Out: D2C Enablement

June, 2023

  • portfolio News

WaterBridge portfolio Chalo raises $45 million in fresh funding to digitize bus commutes

  • May, 2023

  • TechCrunch

  • fund News

WaterBridge Ventures announces second season of That One Idea, a podcast chronicling early-stage founder journeys

  • April, 2023

  • Youtube

  • portfolio News

Eloelo crosses 20M users and gets crowned as India’s fastest growing app

  • April, 2023

  • Business World

  • portfolio News

Atlan debuts as a leader in 3 categories in the G2 Spring 2023 Grid® Reports

  • April, 2023

  • Yahoo Finance

  • portfolio News

Magicpin becomes the largest restaurant aggregator on ONDC

  • March, 2023

  • Outlook India

  • fund News

WaterBridge Ventures hosts D2C Founders and thought leaders at the the D2C Roundtable

  • March, 2023

  • LinkedIn

  • portfolio News

Gold loan startup Yellow Metal gets $3 million in funding led by MSA Novo

  • March, 2023

  • Economic Times

  • portfolio News

Forbes India Covers Ankit Alok Bagaria and Abhi Gawri of Loopworm

  • February, 2023

  • Forbes India

  • portfolio News

Chalo launches 100% Digital bus in Indore in collaboration with AiCTSL

  • January, 2023

  • TOI

  • fund News

WaterBridge hosts a close-knit get-together for VC analysts and associates to bring in the new year

  • January, 2023

  • LinkedIn

  • fund News

WaterBridge Ventures announces the fourth edition of their annual seed funding program Fast Forward

  • January, 2023

  • LinkedIn

  • portfolio News

Asia Insurance Review covers Tejas Jain of BimaKavach

  • January, 2023

  • Asia Insurance Review

Popular View

Founders come from a traditional brick-and-mortar business with no tech-start-up expertise. K-12 Ed-Tech space requires differentiated content to succeed.

Our View

Founders understand the student pain point better than >150 Ed-Tech start-ups we met in K-12. Product-first approach and content pull via DIY doubt-solving for Bharat will be the differentiated growth strategy.

WaterBridge led Seed in 2018.

Today

DoubtNut is India’s most used and fastest growing Ed-Tech App tapping into 135m vernacular students. Differentiated further by low CAC and a content development engine of >4m videos feeding into its ML engine. We exited DoubtNut during its acquisition by Allen Career Institute in 2023.

Popular View

Another grocery delivery app in a red ocean market with JioMart being an established behemoth. Group buying and small town focus is not a differentiator.

Our View

Trust based local and assisted commerce is more likely to work in small Indian towns. Contribution margins can make sense for daily consumables if local micro-entrepreneurs can be tech co-opted.

WaterBridge invested in Pre-Series A in 2020

Today

CityMall is a Series C company that has pioneered a locally driven, assisted, community driven, group buying platform in India. Targeting the over 300M value focused small-town Indian consumers for whom offline supermarkets options for attractive deals and offers are literally far and few. CityMall has built trust in transacting on mobile through local community leaders under an assisted group buying model with a market leading presence across 10 cities.

Popular View

B2B e-commerce already has Udaan as a winner, not sure about another B2B player. Business focused on footwear as a category and not sure of market depth or expansion possibility beyond footwear.

Our View

Founders are the right ‘horses for this course’ given family business background in footwear. Dogged supply-side focus together with tech-led disruption will create a profitable business and long-term moats.

WaterBridge led Pre-Series A in 2019

Today

Bijnis is a Series C Company with over 4,000 manufacturing units or factories using the app to drive demand and receiving orders from >50,000 registered retailers. With 100% of operations being tech-enabled, Bijnis has expanded beyond footwear into apparel and accessories and counts Info Edge, Matrix, WestBridge and Sequoia among its investors.

Popular View

An erstwhile auto-retail i.e. CarWale entrepreneurial team cannot solve for intra-city, public transport. This is a small and highly regulated market

Our View

Founding team has an optimum combination of operations and technology skill sets to disrupt the space. Bus mobility is 4x of ride hailing market. Tech-driven business model and supply side partnerships can create moats.

WaterBridge led Series A in 2017

Today

Chalo emerged as the best resurgence story in mobility post-CoVID. Chalo is India’s largest platform for mass daily commute. A Series D company, Chalo counts Avataar Ventures, LightRock, Raine and Xiaomi among its investors. Chalo has acquired other mobility startups like Vogo and Shuttl.

The Pitch

Prukalpa and Varun had launched “Data for Good” company SocialCops with customers like the UN and India’s National Data Platform.

Our Partnership

WaterBridge led the first institutional seed round in 2018 and SocialCops pivoted to build a product in the data management space. Atlan was born in 2020 as a home for data teams in the modern data stack. Marketing and sales focused towards the US with a global development model were architected along with early PMF.

Today And Ahead

Atlan is often referred to by experts as a “Data Discovery Rocketship”. Atlan’s cloud-native, governance-enabled DataOps platform creates a common collaboration workspace for diverse data consumers like analysts, scientists & business users. Its no-code query builder allows less technical teams to partner with data teams to explore data and allows the data to easily be pulled into analytics and Business Intelligence tools like Tableau & PowerBI. Raised $173 million cumulatively till date, with the latest round being a $105M Series C in 2024, led by GIC, Meritech Capital, with participation from existing investors Salesforce Ventures, PeakXV Partners and Insight Partners.

The Pitch

Pharma science graduates, Raj and Harj ran a pharmacy chain in Canada and IIT Delhi alum and technologist Abhinav had just taken his company Rocket Fuel public on NASDAQ. Together, they made for a formidable founder-market fit with both tech and industry expertise.

Our Partnership

WaterBridge led the first institutional seed round in 2019 when they launched PocketPills. They quickly secured a first mover advantage as Canada’s foremost online pharmacy and expanded to five provinces. Raj and Harj’s expertise from building an offline chain of pharmacies made navigating the regulatory maze easier and securing partnerships, early on, with big pharma companies.

Today and Ahead

PocketPills is the largest digital pharmacy in Canada. They bring a frictionless online pharmacy experience with subscription-driven models, free delivery anywhere in Canada and robotics-driven warehouse automation. Beyond pharma, they provide comprehensive care plans and telemedicine APIs to embed services into products. Raised CAD 35 million with WaterBridge participating in each round since our first.