Golden Sparrow - Q1, 2026 Newsletter
Golden Sparrow is a India-focused, early-stage fund. We invest in Rare Birds across Deep Tech and AI Enterprise.
“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” — Joseph Campbell
Fund I, Fund II
We deployed our last dollar from Fund I into a follow-on investment with Hosted AI — a GPU-virtualization company that raised a $19M seed from Creandum.
Fund I net TVPI sits at 1.2x and gross MOIC at 1.4x — top decile for 2023 vintage funds.
Fund II launched on January 21 with its first close. We have $12M committed toward a $20M target across 40+ LPs, with a majority of Fund I investors re-upping. That re-up rate is the validation that matters most. Within days of our first close, we made our first Fund II investment into Clario — the Marie Kondo of enterprise data.
Ritik is now fully embedded as Principal. Venkat and Michael are deepening their Operating Partner roles across our Deep Tech and Enterprise AI investments. We also launched a Student Venture Partner program, with our first SVP joining from IIT Madras.
Both funds are underwritten to return 5x. Every investment is screened against that bar.
By The Numbers
LPs in Fund I: 62
LPs in Fund II: 40+
Portfolio companies: 18 (you can view them here)
Deep Tech Allocation: 8 companies
AI Infra and Applications: 10 companies
Capital from female LPs: 25%
Expert Venture Partners: 5
Full-time team: 3
Performance Fund I: 1.2x Net TVPI | 1.4x Gross MOIC
Performance Fund II: 1.0x Net TVPI
“What are you afraid of?”
That is one of the questions you often find us asking founders — as early as the first call.
Some founders answer with business risks. Others go deeper — into personal fears, signaling an ability to step back and share something real. That is typically the “rare bird” we want to back.
What path brought the founder to this idea? Why is this problem theirs to solve? What is the hardest thing they have been through personally? Purpose, journey, self-awareness — when they converge, conviction sharpens.
Hummingbird, a venture capital firm we admire, takes this further — actively seeking neurodivergent founders who bring extraordinary pattern recognition, obsessive depth, and a tolerance for discomfort that maps directly to startup resilience. That lens has shaped our own. Understanding a founder’s early wiring — even childhood — now drives much of our profiling.
Should AI also play a role in this process? We fed Claude our speech-to-text transcripts — the raw exchanges with founders — and had it score them against companies we invested in and those we passed on. Across all recent portfolio decisions, the model matched our conclusions with high accuracy. We find it useful in the debrief room as a sharpening tool — but never as a replacement.
Resilience is the most important trait we look for — in founders and in our own team members. Startups do not follow the script. When the plan breaks — and it will — we want founders with the energy and the sheer will to blast through whatever stands in front of them.
The Joker Card
A month before joining Golden Sparrow as Principal, Ritik shared an investment opportunity in a semiconductor software company. My two operating partners and I were at 7 or 8 out of 10. Ritik was at 9. He made a solid argument, pushed hard to win us over, and we still passed.
That did not sit well with me.
A few days later, I flew to Bangalore, sat down with Ritik, and walked through a 10-page strategy document outlining our Fund II Strategy and investment process. We instituted a rigorous “Two-Pillar” Investment Committee framework which sets a high bar: at least 2 of us must be at 9 or above out of 10 to invest.
But embedded in that is a provision I am proud of: Ritik holds one joker per calendar year. He can push through an investment regardless of where the rest of us stand. It protects against groupthink, rewards independent conviction, and ensures the person closest to the founder pipeline has real agency.
For the record — the semiconductor software company went on to raise a strong round at 2.5x the valuation at which we were offered the deal. Ritik was right, which is exactly the point. Early-stage investing is not a democracy. It is a bet on judgment. And sometimes, the strongest signal comes from the person who bangs on the table the loudest.
India and the Wars
Jaishankar, India’s foreign minister, remains as shrewd as a fox.
When Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz after the US-Israeli strikes in February, he negotiated safe passage for Indian LPG tankers directly with Tehran — while the rest of the world waited. Weeks earlier, he struck a deal with Trump to reduce tariffs on Indian goods from 50% to 18% in exchange for a commitment to phase out Russian oil imports. India has quietly continued buying Russian crude anyway.
When the US torpedoed the IRIS Dena — an Iranian warship returning from naval exercises hosted by India — New Delhi said almost nothing. Opposition leaders called it a strategic embarrassment. But the silence was itself a calculation. India does not pick sides. It picks outcomes for its best interest.
Jaishankar has said that the expectation of freezing a 1945 world order forever was “unrealistic.” The post-war system was built “by the West, for the West”. That architecture is shifting — and India and the Global South stand to gain from what replaces it.
But none of this insulates India from the immediate fallout. The country imports roughly 90% of its oil. Brent crude has surged past $100 a barrel. Millions of Indian workers in the Middle East send remittances home, and supply routes through Hormuz remain choked. For an economy as energy-hungry as India’s, this is a slow burn that will take many months to resolve. No amount of diplomacy offsets energy math.
With shifting global supply chains and defense priorities, we see tailwinds for our deep tech companies like EtherealX or Morphing Machines and the opportunity for Golden Sparrow to capitalize on a India-first drive.
Inside Clario
Clario tackles the “garbage in, garbage out” problem for the AI era. Large enterprises are drowning in legacy data ROT (Redundant, Obsolete, Trivial), which increases infrastructure costs and legal risks. Their platform cleans and organizes these file stores — the “Marie Kondo” for legacy data.
I met Yousuf Khan three years ago. He suggested investing in Golden Sparrow to get closer to India deal flow. I told him we would share deals anyway, and our relationship compounded from there. Our Operating Partner Michael Marmor later met him in Palo Alto, role-played the CIO buyer, and gave us access to an otherwise closed-door deal.
Yousuf is a veteran CIO (Qualys, Pure Storage, Moveworks), former advisor to Zoom, investor in Discord, and former General Partner at Ridge Ventures.
Thank you for being with us on this journey. See you here next quarter.