Ishaan Jaffer

India is not behind on talent. It is behind on risk appetite. Building LLMs or foundational AI infra is not about capability. It is about capital. Not just any capital, but capital that is comfortable with long timelines, unclear outcomes, and massive burn. Most of India’s funding still chases near-term traction. SaaS, fintech, consumer. Sectors where returns are easier to model. But AI infra does not play by those rules. It demands belief before proof. The Middle East launching a sovereign fund to accelerate AI through public private bets is not just money. That is intent. India will not build foundational AI by hoping startups will figure it out alone. It needs conviction at the system level. And a willingness to back uncertainty at scale.

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"Hiring really good AI researchers is incredibly important." Xiao Zhang, CEO and Co-founder of Collov AI, talks about hiring for AI product teams on Tech Scenes Unplugged. #venturebacked #vcbacked #venturecapital #leadership #ceo #founder #operatingsystem #peakOS #foundermode

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Sometimes the investors who know your space best are the hardest to convince. In a recent conversation from nextNYC's “How I Raised My Seed” series, Manvitha Mallela of Flock AI, Yuvraj Singh Shergill of ARUSTO and I talked about something founders often find surprising during fundraising. Specialist investors have usually seen every version of the idea before. They’ve watched similar companies try and fail, sometimes multiple times. So when you show up convinced that now is the right moment, they may be more skeptical than someone seeing the opportunity for the first time. That’s why generalist investors sometimes move faster. They’re encountering the problem with fresh eyes. We also talked about outreach. Cold emails usually fail when they’re generic. But when a founder references something specific, an investor’s podcast, thesis, or past investment, the response rate changes dramatically. Fundraising is a numbers game. But it’s also a relevance game. Thanks to Qapita for sponsoring this series! #venturecapital #fundraising #startups #founders #seedround #investors #entrepreneurship #howiraisedmyseed

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The SF/Bangalore corridor is finally real. I’ve spent the past few weeks across Stanford, YC, and in closed-room sessions with infra builders, researchers and operators in SF. Founders, capital and ideas are moving both ways. The physics on each side are totally different, and complimentary. San Francisco is running the cognition game: -Foundational research and frontier labs (Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, OpenAI, Anthropic) -Dense enterprise networks and deep capital (trust and network driven) -The only place where new architectures, RL, security, compliance and eval systems truly compound. But it’s also brutally competitive, expensive, and narrative-driven. The Valley doesn't fund tourism, it funds ambition and originality. To win here, you need presence, references, domain fluency, enterprise relationships, and patience for immigration and burn. India is running the behaviour game: -Billion-user distribution, sovereign + vernacular data, and multimodal behaviour by default -Hybrid human-in-loop workflows and the cheapest feedback cycles on the planet. - Smart hardware, robotics, defence, and space (cost curves that actually compound, government support, talent density) India doesn’t trade on story; it trades on usage, retention, and trust. India’s advantages are structural: engineering ambition + hunger, cultural comfort with hybrid workflows, and an economy that rewards products people actually use. For decades, the flight path was one-way: talent left, capital came back. Now it’s a loop. Founders still fly west for Y Combinator, networks, and research; American companies and diaspora founders are flying east for the scale, cost efficiency and billion-user testbeds. SF still sometimes looks down on India. And India still gets performative about SF. But credibility is earned, not borrowed. Geography amplifies your work, it doesn’t replace it. You can now build in both worlds. Research where depth lives. Distribute where behaviour compounds. The corridor is now operational, not aspirational.

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Startups are the leading indicator of how AI is transforming workforces. While the world is busy arguing about when AI will reach AGI, Shantanu Gangal and the team at Prodigal are busy proving what AI can do right now: augment human talent, so engineering pods of 3-4 are covering the ground that previously would've taken 18 engineers. Proud to have them in the MGV family and great to see the team getting the recognition they deserve, not just for the great product they're building but also how they're building it: https://lnkd.in/gm7eHtDW

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On the latest episode of Embracing Erosion I sat down with Suyog Deshpande, Co-Founder & CEO of Webless (a Fluvio Ventures portfolio company). Before starting Webless, Suyog spent years at Amplitude, Salesforce, and Samsara - shaping products and GTM strategy at scale as a product marketing leader. That perspective is now fueling one of the boldest bets in tech: 🏗️ rebuilding the web for LLMs. Instead of optimizing for clicks and SEO, Webless imagines an agentic web -where sites are designed to interact directly with AI models and agents. We dug into: - What an LLM-native web could actually look like - How companies can prepare to be LLM-ready - What metrics will matter beyond pageviews and clicks - Why safety and trust are core to agent-driven experiences - Lessons Suyog brings from “big tech” into this transformation If you’re curious about how discovery, trust, and value exchange will evolve online, this one’s worth your time. Link to the full episode in the comments 👇

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