Few Indian startup-funding ideas have travelled as fast as WTFund, the non-dilutive grant fund launched in April 2024 by Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath for entrepreneurs aged 25 or under. Born out of the WTF podcast, WTFund set out to find the top 1% of young Indian entrepreneurs and hand them capital without taking any equity.
The investment thesis is deliberately simple. WTFund is sector-agnostic and invests at the earliest end: what matters is founder audacity, not pedigree or geography. Each selected startup receives a ₹20 lakh non-dilutive grant, letting founders keep full ownership, plus support until their first institutional round. The launch plan spoke of forty young entrepreneurs a year via rigorous screening; actual cohorts have been smaller and more selective.
Sectors and stages skew early: pre-seed startups across AI, healthtech, deeptech, SaaS, D2C, edtech, fintech, agritech, cleantech, hardware and manufacturing, security and consumer tech. In under two years, WTFund has received more than 5,000 applications from founders in 50+ cities, with ventures spanning AI diagnostics to sustainable pet food.
On size, the only publicly stated figure is the ₹20 lakh grant per selected startup; the fund's total corpus is not publicly disclosed. The model is built on grants rather than equity — a cultural shift meant to reduce seed-stage dilution pressure.
Three cohorts have been announced. The inaugural C1/24 cohort of 15 grantees, unveiled at the WTF Summit in Mumbai in September 2024, included Pamawel (plant-based menstrual pain relief), Mars (virtual workstations for creators), Oh! Nuts (healthy nut snacks), Pawsible Foods (plant-based pet food), RNT Health Insights (AI-assisted cancer detection), Biocompute (DNA data storage), CallPrep (AI sales prep), Urban Animal (dog DNA testing) and Pixa AI (AI plush companions). Cohort C2/24 selected nine startups from 2,400 applications, among them Armatrix (robotic arm for industrial inspection), Modus AI (fraud detection), Ai.gnosis (AI autism screening), BYTES (vision-based ADAS), InnerGize (mental wellness wearables), NASADYA (solid-state hydrogen storage) and Neoperk (soil testing). The third cohort, C1/25, unveiled in December 2025, comprises eight startups: Aeyi (AI visual perception over CCTV), Antimattr (audio wearable for ambient computing), BloomRehab (robotic physiotherapy), O3 Security (software supply-chain security), Astraeus Innovus (low-cost oral cancer saliva test), Placestation (desktop PCB assembly), Prava (payments infra for AI shopping apps) and Turocrates (AI pathology platform).
Kamath leads it, aiming to go from funding a handful of companies today to aiding thousands of young companies one day. In December 2025, Prashanth Prakash, Accel India founding partner and Padma Shri awardee, joined WTFund as strategic adviser to shape investment decisions, mentorship structures and focus areas across deeptech, consumer products, advanced manufacturing and B2B value chains.
Founders apply when cohorts open via the official WTFund page; the C1/25 application window closed on 31 May 2025. Beyond the grant, the package includes operator-first mentorship pods, a go-to-market studio, beta testing, talent channels via an internship programme, a fractional CXO database, moonlighting opportunities, legal and accounting assistance, and strategic partnerships with top companies. In December 2025 the fund also launched the first WTFund Bootcamp, a structured programme offering mentorship, operational playbooks and investor access to prepare grantees for sustainable scale.
Why it matters for founders
If you are under 25 and building in India, WTFund is one of the few capital sources offering ₹20 lakh without asking for equity — plus a mentorship and GTM network that money alone cannot buy. Watch for cohort announcements and apply early; selectivity is high, but the cost of an application is zero.