Upsparks: the proprietary micro-VC backing founders at Day 0

Upsparks Capital is a Bengaluru-based proprietary venture capital firm that has quietly become one of India’s most active early-stage investors. Founded in 2020 by Shivam Prasad, Mohamad Faraz and Vinay Jain — the trio behind communications-tech venture Solutions Infini, which merged with a European firm, became Kaleyra and is now NYSE-listed — the fund runs entirely on the partners’ own capital, with no external limited partners.

The numbers tell the story: since 2020 the fund has deployed Rs 57 crore across 65 investments, with an acceptance rate below 3% of the startups it evaluates. It currently manages assets worth over Rs 198 crore and claims a multiple on invested capital (MOIC) of 3.5x to date — a performance that places it in the top tier of early-stage domestic funds. Of its investments, 27 portfolio companies have gone on to raise follow-on funding totalling Rs 4,500 crore, with Upsparks writing the first institutional cheque in 80% of its deals.

What Upsparks invests in

Upsparks is a micro-VC focused on pre-seed and seed rounds, typically writing cheques of Rs 1–2 crore. The team reviews more than 150 pitch decks a month and often makes investment decisions within 10 days of the first meeting. Its areas of focus include AI infrastructure, fintech rails and global software, but it deliberately leaves room for conviction-led outliers — targeting 7 to 10 core investments a year, with a plan to add 25 new startups over the next 24 to 36 months.

The portfolio includes breakout names such as marketing-tech firm Pixis, mixed-reality platform Flam, AI startup Smallest.ai, space-tech venture GalaxEye, Wokelo AI, Fello, FanPlay and QuickLend. To date the firm has seen three exits — logistics startup Zypp, sustainable-packaging venture Bambrew and a partial exit in Pixis — and counts four portfolio companies as “soonicorns” nearing a $1 billion valuation.

Thesis: founder quality first, AI at the application layer

Co-founder Faraz says founder quality is central, but the bar has moved: great founders now understand fundraising, storytelling and metrics far earlier. In AI, Upsparks avoids thin ChatGPT wrappers and backs defensibility through domain depth, proprietary data and workflow integration — industry-specific AI tools with operational leverage in banking, manufacturing and compliance-heavy financial services, plus agentic infrastructure and orchestration layers. “India’s edge,” Faraz argues, “lies in building AI-native applications that solve uniquely Indian problems in healthcare, vernacular commerce, financial inclusion, or agri-tech.”