A new home-grown pool of capital for Indian AI
India’s early-stage founders just gained a dedicated backer with the launch of Boundless Ventures, a Rs 200 crore AI fund created by investor and entrepreneur Natasha Malpani. Announced today, the fund targets pre-seed and seed startups working on AI-native products—from consumer applications to infrastructure and “agent tooling”—and even Make-in-India hardware. It has already deployed capital into six companies, signaling a running start rather than a concept on paper.
Who’s behind it—and why now
Malpani, formerly a partner at Kae Capital, brings a blend of venture and operating experience (she previously founded Boundless Media and helped scale Dice Media). Her pitch is that India sits at an inflection point where AI is shifting “from experiments to infrastructure,” creating space for teams who can turn raw model capabilities into enduring products and platforms. That view dovetails with the momentum in India’s gen-AI ecosystem, which has seen accelerating deal flow through 2025.
What the Rs 200 crore AI fund will target
Boundless Ventures says it will write pre-seed and seed cheques across several AI vectors:
- Consumer applications that make AI useful in everyday life
- Infrastructure for training, serving, and securing AI systems
- Agent tooling, a fast-moving category enabling autonomous or semi-autonomous task execution
- Vertical AI in areas such as healthcare and logistics
- Make-in-India hardware, spanning sensors, edge compute, or robotics components
The initial six investments reportedly include SuperHealth (healthcare), Armatrix (robotics), Piersight (spacetech), Knot (quick fashion delivery), and two stealth ventures in AI infrastructure and consumer AI—an early signal that the fund will straddle both software and hardware.
Where the capital comes from
Rather than a traditional institutional LP base, Malpani has assembled the Rs 200 crore from her personal network, including friends and family. That structure can be nimble: decisions may be faster and less constrained by LP committees, which matters in seed markets where timing determines whether a fund secures, say, the first institutional cheque into a breakout AI infra team. The fund also expects to support founders with storytelling and network access, a nod to the reality that distribution and narrative are often as decisive as code quality at the earliest stages.
The market context: India’s AI surge
Recent indicators suggest India’s AI startup momentum is real. As the Economic Times has reported, generative AI startups in India raised about $524 million in the first seven months of 2025, the highest in five years—evidence that both domestic and global investors are leaning in. In parallel, the Indian ecosystem benefits from the nation’s talent density, cost-effective compute via regional clouds, and public digital rails (e.g., Aadhaar, UPI) that make new AI products easier to launch and scale. The new Rs 200 crore AI fund enters this slipstream with a thesis tuned to local strengths and global markets
Potential impact on founders
For founders, the presence of a single-minded AI fund at pre-seed/seed can change the calculus in three ways:
- Category expertise: A fund concentrated on AI can evaluate technical roadmaps (model choice, data strategy, evals, safety) with more nuance, which improves the signal for follow-on investors.
- Speed: Seed rounds in AI often move in days, not months. A network-driven fund can commit quickly when conviction is high.
- Bridge to scale: Early money paired with narrative and customer introductions can take a team from prototype to revenue faster—critical in a space where time-to-traction determines whether the startup survives the next model or platform shift.
Because the fund spans consumer, infra, agent tools, verticals, and hardware, it can back full-stack combinations: for instance, a robotics-hardware startup paired with an in-house inference stack and an agent layer for autonomy. That flexibility matters as Indian startups increasingly blend software and hardware to serve global markets.
What early picks reveal about the thesis
The first disclosed investments—healthtech, robotics, spacetech, quick commerce, infra and consumer AI—suggest a barbell approach: one end anchored in infrastructure and agentic building blocks, the other in vertical applications with near-term revenue. A healthtech bet like SuperHealth aligns with rising demand for AI-assisted clinical workflows; robotics via Armatrix and spacetech via Piersight point to India’s deep-tech manufacturing and aerospace talent; Knot hints at consumer-side experiments where AI can personalize discovery and automate ops.
Risks and what to watch
Seed funds face classic challenges: winner-picking amid rapid platform shifts (e.g., upgraded foundation models), compute costs that can crush unit economics, and regulatory evolution in safety-critical verticals like health. The fund’s breadth is a strength but also requires disciplined portfolio construction: too many small bets can dilute attention; too few can miss emergent categories. Execution will hinge on how Boundless Ventures helps teams win distribution, secure partnerships, and achieve technical defensibility (data moats, eval rigor, safety and alignment practices).
Outlook: measuring success
In a year, useful markers of progress for this Rs 200 crore AI fund will include:
- Follow-on rounds for the initial six portfolio companies
- Technical milestones (e.g., shipping agent features beyond copilots; inference cost reductions via quantization or distillation)
- First enterprise contracts, pilots turned production, or exports for Make-in-India hardware bets
- Portfolio diversity across infra, agents, and verticals—without straying into unfocused spray-and-pray
With Indian gen-AI fundraising hitting multi-year highs and an expanding bench of technical founders, the timing looks favorable. If Boundless Ventures can convert its network-led model and cross-category thesis into durable companies, it will become a meaningful node in India’s AI capital stack.
