PeerCapital is a Bengaluru-based early-stage venture capital fund set up in late 2022 by three managing partners — Ankur Pahwa, Karthik Prabhakar and Rohit M A — who position themselves as founders' peers rather than traditional investors. The firm's own description is that it supports founders on their zero-to-one journey, leaning on a collective five decades of experience across entrepreneurship, operations, growth and fund management.
The partners bring operating and investing backgrounds to the table. Prabhakar spent over 11 years as a venture investor, most recently as managing director of Chiratae Ventures, one of India's best-known homegrown funds. Rohit M A is the founder and former managing director of the Cloudnine Group of Hospitals, while Pahwa was a partner and national leader for e-commerce and consumer internet at EY India. Together with their limited partners — largely founders of tech and non-tech companies, family offices and high-net-worth individuals — they offer founders a network that goes beyond capital.
PeerCapital invests from seed to Series A, writing initial cheques of $500,000 to $2 million (up to around ₹15 crore) and keeping meaningful reserves for follow-on rounds. The firm targets the tech enablers of digital consumption in India and applied AI, with a declared focus on consumer internet (e-commerce and marketplaces, gaming and the creator economy), fintech (particularly on the credit side), healthtech on the digital side, SaaS, B2B commerce, enterprise technology and climate tech.
On fund size, the firm disclosed at launch that its maiden Fund I — structured as an India Category II Alternative Investment Fund — had marked a first close of ₹300 crore (about $37.5 million) in mid-2022, with a planned corpus of ₹600 crore (about $75 million) and a green-shoe option of a further ₹300 crore that could take the total to ₹900 crore (about $112.5 million). The firm said at the time it would deploy the fund across roughly 30 companies.
The portfolio now spans consumer and commerce names such as Vaaree, the home-furnishing marketplace; Furrl, the content-led commerce platform; Flash, the AI shopping assistant; Bidso, a B2B commerce platform for toys; and Fabriclore, a B2B fabric-sourcing platform. It also backs managed B2B marketplace Saveo, creator-economy marketplace One Impression, AI sports-analytics firm Stupa, and workspace-management software UrSpayce. The firm's own site reports that 23 per cent of its companies are focused on Bharat, 25 per cent are women-led and 7 per cent are based outside India's metro cities.
Beyond capital, PeerCapital runs PeerPerks, a perks programme with more than 25 offers from partner services for portfolio founders. It also convenes founder events such as its C/Shift consumer-tech series, Alt+Play for gaming, and HealthCraze for healthtech, and publishes investment thinking on its Substack newsletter.
Why it matters for founders
If you are raising seed to Series A in consumer tech, fintech, healthtech or SaaS and want hands-on, founder-friendly backers with operating DNA, PeerCapital is worth a look. Reach out through [email protected] or a warm introduction from one of their founder-LPs, and come with a clear view of how you will deploy a $0.5–2 million first cheque.