In 2012, Ankita Vashistha sat through pitch meetings as a member of the Indian Angel Network and noticed something wrong: women founders were rare, and when they did appear alongside male co-founders, they often sat silently while their partners pitched. Three years later she launched Saha Fund — India's first venture capital fund dedicated to women entrepreneurs — determined to change who gets funded in Indian tech.
Saha Fund invests in early-stage technology companies that are founded or led by women, employ a majority-women workforce, or build products and services for women. Its sector lens is deliberately broad: e-commerce, social media, mobile, cloud, analytics, education, healthcare, food tech and tech platforms — any company that can scale by leveraging digital. The philosophy, stated plainly on the fund's website, is to promote women's participation in the economy through value investing.
The portfolio reads like a cross-section of India's women-led startup wave: LoveLocal, the hyperlocal retail platform; Fitternity, the fitness discovery marketplace; Joules to Watts, the IT services firm; Shoptimize, the e-commerce enablement platform; GoCoop, the artisan marketplace; and Phenom People, the HR technology company. Earlier bets included Kaaryah and Stelae Technologies.
The team is led by Vashistha as CEO and Managing Partner, with Usha Amin as Partner and Deepak Aggarwal as CFO, supported by an advisory bench that includes Mohandas Pai, Avinash Vashistha, Jens Hortsmann and Aarti Gupta. The fund's capital came from names including Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Ranjan Pai and SIDBI.
What makes Saha Fund worth studying is not just the thesis but the outcome. The fund made around 12 investments and then completely exited, returning 3x to investors — with a profitable exit in JoulesToWatts and an acquisition of portfolio company Saturnity by CultFit. Vashistha's own verdict: the fund proved that women-led investing means both business and returns. She has since gone on to build Arise Ventures, backing more than 520 founders across the US, UK and India, and StrongHer Ventures for global women-led bets. The Saha Fund's own corpus was not publicly disclosed.
Why it matters for founders
If you are a woman founder building in consumer, health, fintech or deep tech, Saha Fund's story is the clearest proof point in Indian venture that a women-first thesis can deliver institutional-grade returns. Pitch the problem you understand as the target user, show how digital scale compounds it, and remember that this fund's legacy — now continued through Arise Ventures — rewards founders who build for women as customers, not just as a demographic.