Ankurit Capital is a women-led, early-stage venture capital fund with a thesis few others in India articulate so sharply: back the startups being built on top of India's Digital Public Infrastructure. The SEBI-registered Category I AIF, sponsored by early-stage investor and mentoring platform Venture Gurukool, is investing out of a ₹200 crore maiden fund.
The fund is led by two women general partners. Ankhi Das, co-founder and managing partner, spent a decade as the public policy leader for Meta across India and South and Central Asia — handling market entry, risk and local impact investments — after a long career at Microsoft. Her co-founder Ntasha, also managing partner, brings more than seven years of early-stage investing experience across India and Southeast Asia and was previously the chief investment officer at Venture Gurukool. Their investor base blends UHNIs and family offices with an institutional anchor: SIDBI's Fund of Funds, which backed the fund as an institutional LP.
The investment philosophy, laid out on the firm's own site, starts with digital IDs, payment systems and data-exchange frameworks — the rails of the India Stack — and backs ventures transforming the everyday economy, with a preference for businesses built on recurring transactional revenues. Ankurit makes concentrated seed investments and co-investments at pre-Series A and Series A in companies that have demonstrated product-market fit, and it explicitly looks for strong founding teams — "an eclectic mix of serial entrepreneurs and industry professionals" — rather than ideas alone.
The portfolio already shows the thesis in action. OmniCard, the RBI-licensed prepaid payments and spend-management startup, raised a $3 million pre-Series A round led by Ankurit Capital and Taisys of Taiwan. Other disclosed investments include Maalexi, the B2B agri-trade and export-financing platform; Likeminds, the in-app community SaaS; Deccan Healthcare, the D2C anti-ageing brand; and, from the firm's own founder testimonials, Karbon Card, Meddo, Home Capital, Sattviko and Ant Works. The stated sectoral hunting ground spans healthtech, fintech, social media and supply chain.
Why it matters for founders
If your startup sits on UPI, Aadhaar, ONDC, account aggregators or any other India Stack rail — payments, lending, health data, logistics — Ankurit is one of the few funds where that is the core thesis rather than a side bet. Come with proven product-market fit and repeat transactions, not just a deck, and expect a hands-on investor: the founders in its portfolio consistently describe the team as operating partners, not passive capital.