Sheena Jindal is from Boston.
She grew up there, attended MIT, and labored on the Boston Consulting Group for a number of years. She launched a startup, labored at a startup, after which grew to become an investor at Bessemer and Comcast Ventures (CV).
Final 12 months, her worlds collided when she determined to launch her personal fund, Sugar Free Capital, a agency that focuses on investing in technical founders from MIT. She nabbed LPs, together with the household workplaces of heavy-hitting tech executives from firms like Nvidia and Citadel, and on Monday introduced the closing of Sugar Free’s $32 million inaugural fund.
One premise of the fund is discovered within the title. Whereas working at CV, she led dozens of offers however discovered herself dismayed on the sky-high valuations of the 2021 period. She saved referring to funding alternatives as being “too sugary, within the sense that valuations had been too excessive,” she instructed TechCrunch.
From there, she began enthusiastic about the innovation of the previous few years and the way it was centered on optimization. “However we’re actually getting into the age of intelligence,” she mentioned. She designed a thesis round the concept that capturing the age of intelligence would require two issues: technical founders, predominantly these with a “programs engineering mindset,” which is what MIT brings, she added, and focus.
“The information have proven us traditionally that enterprise returns are concentrated amongst a choose group of winners.”
The concentrate on MIT additionally has another excuse. Not like Harvard and Stanford, there isn’t a giant class of MIT alumni who’re early-stage buyers, although MIT founders typically go on to begin and work at profitable firms. “MIT of us go into finance, however they go into extra quantitative roles,” she mentioned — extra hedge fund and late-stage investing.
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That white area provides Jindal, a uncommon solo lady GP, an outsized alternative. She plans to spend money on 15 early-stage firms (she’s already backed 4), writing checks that vary from $1 million to $5 million. The agency focuses on AI native infrastructure and picks a brand new theme every quarter to concentrate on. For instance, this quarter, she is searching for firms centered on bodily AI, knowledge middle optimization, and AI brokers.
Sugar Free has already backed a protection firm, a gaming firm, and an organization in workflow automation. Jindal hopes to chop a minimum of 4 to 5 checks a 12 months. A lot of the inbound is from her reaching out to founders or referrals, however she’s open to chilly outreach.
Total, Jindal feels fortunate about this fund. The fundraising surroundings was and is difficult for a lot of GPs, particularly solo ones, and particularly girls. She mentioned LPs favored that her agency supplied good entry to MIT expertise and had a transparent thesis.
“We’re within the transition interval between this new world order of AI native expertise and the infrastructure and enterprise fashions of the previous,” Jindal mentioned. “I’m excited to see how we’re capable of harmoniously mix these two when it comes to infrastructure, expertise, and the human expertise, and to me, that’s actually thrilling”.