Artificial intelligence-focused venture capital firm Boundless VC has closed its maiden fund at ₹300 crore ($35 million), as investors step up bets on early-stage startups building in areas ranging from artificial intelligence and robotics to space technology and advanced applications.
The Mumbai-based firm, launched in 2025 by former Kae Capital partner Natasha Malpani, will invest primarily at the pre-seed and seed stages, typically writing cheques of $500,000-$1 million and following on in new rounds. It has invested in 10 companies so far and plans to continue deploying capital over the next two to three years.
This comes at a time when India has fallen behind the US and China in building globally competitive foundational AI models. While the industry sees greater opportunities for Indian startups at the application layer, a lack of early-stage local risk capital may pose challenges, especially as domestic demand favours AI tools developed abroad, particularly in the US and China.
“We decided we were going to do ₹300 crore, or $35 million. We were oversubscribed. We wanted to make sure we focused on pre-seed and seed,” Malpani, general partner at Boundless VC, told Mint.
The firm had initially targeted a corpus of ₹200 crore, which was subsequently increased after the fund was oversubscribed, Malpani said without giving further details.
Risk capital for early-stage AI
Boundless VC is among a limited group of Indian venture capital firms, including pi Ventures, Antler India and 3one4 Capital, actively investing in AI applications at the pre-revenue and early stages.
Malpani, who led the firm's generative AI thesis in her previous role at Kae Capital, believes the next wave of Indian technology companies will require investors willing to take risks before conventional metrics such as revenue and unit economics become meaningful.
“Globally, tech firms are raising multi-billion-dollar rounds on the basis of their background and ideas.” For an early-stage investor, Malpani said, the job is to identify founders building technologies with little precedent and back them before the market develops.
“We have to do the work at pre-seed and seed. We have to surface the companies, then they grow, and then growth funds will invest. It’s a function of time.”
Boundless invests across the AI stack, including foundational models, infrastructure, applications, chips, memory and power. Its current focus is on the intersection of infrastructure and applications, particularly companies building technologies that could not have existed before AI.
“We’re not doing just horizontal infrastructure or just horizontal applications. All my companies… are actually fusing something in infrastructure, memory, context or governance with the application layer.”
Its portfolio includes Litmus, which is building AI-powered personalised tutoring; Glide, a travel discovery company; and Hypernorm, which uses AI for wealth management and structured products.
In frontier technology, which includes any novel or developing technology, the firm has backed Armatrix, which focuses on last-mile industrial automation; Piersight, a startup that operates in real-time ocean intelligence via satellites; and Knot, an AI-native fashion discovery and logistics platform.
Malpani said more than half of Boundless's portfolio companies have raised follow-on rounds from prominent seed and growth-stage investors.
The firm has announced 10 teams from the fund so far, with several portfolio companies already raising or in the process of raising follow-on rounds.
Finding founders
Sourcing is central to Boundless's strategy, with the firm speaking to at least 1,000 founders a year and spending significant time with researchers, universities and technology companies to identify emerging areas before they become mainstream.
The firm works with institutions including IIT Madras, IISc, Stanford and Oxford, and maintains relationships with frontier-technology companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI and Nvidia.
This research-led approach comes as investors in India increasingly look towards sectors such as AI, semiconductors, advanced manufacturing and clean energy for the next wave of technology growth. As global supply chains are reshaped by geopolitics, research-driven startups are also attracting greater investor attention.
The firm says it is building a long-term investment platform rather than pursuing a one-off fund strategy.
Boundless joins a growing list of Indian venture capital firms that have raised or launched new funds in recent months. These include early- and mid-stage investors such as Tenacity Ventures, Stellaris Venture Partners, India Quotient, Prime Ventures, Accel, A91 Partners, Cornerstone VC and Bessemer Venture Partners, signalling renewed fundraising activity across India's venture capital ecosystem.