TDV Partners: The Day-Zero Consumer VC Hunting India's Next Category Giants

TDV Partners — short for Trillion Dollar Ventures — is a Bengaluru-based micro venture capital firm that calls itself "your first investor." Founded in 2021 by Ujwal Sutaria, a 2X founder turned investor, the firm invests at day zero: no product and no revenue required, just an idea with relevant background.

The fund has been scaling fast. In October 2024 it launched its Rs 50-crore second fund, reported by The Hindu BusinessLine, to make 10–12 investments a year at the pre-seed and seed stages with average ticket sizes of Rs 1–2 crore per startup. Its first fund was roughly Rs 25 crore (~$3 million), writing $100K cheques to around 30 startups, according to Inc42. Notably, the fund lifecycle is kept deliberately short at 5–7 years — about half of the traditional 10–12 — so capital returns to LPs faster for active redeployment.

Thesis: consumer first, categories being built

TDV's thesis is unapologetically consumer. Roughly 80% of capital is deployed across three themes — consumer tech, consumer AI, and consumer upgrade — with the remaining 20% kept opportunistic for exceptional founders. Within those, it backs platform plays, marketplaces and exchange-style business models across fintech, gaming, the creator economy, social, and one distinctive non-consensus bet: spiritual tech (faithtech), alongside consumer upgrade. Sutaria has called faithtech a deeply cultural category with no definitive digital leaders yet — a whitespace the fund is happy to own. The firm prefers serial founders or those with deep domain expertise building high-tech, low-operations businesses.

Portfolio

Founders publicly associated with TDV's day-zero backing include Kindlife (Radhika Ghai), Aftershoot (Harshit Dwivedi), Hypergro (Rituraj Biswas), HireQuotient (Smarthveer Sidana) and TradeX (Divij Goyal) — all quoted on the firm's site as partners from the earliest days. Its faithtech bets include AppsForBharat, DevDham and Soulsensei, per Inc42. Sutaria's own track record adds context: as a 2X founder he built FruitOn (cold-pressed juice) and Athletto (sportstech), then spent time at InnoVen Capital working with companies such as Swiggy, BlackBuck, Licious, Eruditus and DealShare on their journey from early stage to scale.

Support runs from brainstorming to first customers, hiring, go-to-market and follow-on fundraising — the hands-on, 3am-call style its portfolio founders describe. There is no formal accelerator program publicly listed, and perks beyond capital are not publicly itemized.