Bharat Innovation Fund

The three co-founders — Ashwin Raguraman, Shyam Menon, and Kunal Khattar — serve as the fund's managing partners and lead investment decisions. They are supported by a technical investment committee that draws on domain expertise from IIM Ahmedabad's faculty and research network, a structural advantage given the fund's embedding within the CIIE ecosystem.

Bharat Innovation Fund operates in partnership with the Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) at IIM Ahmedabad. This is not a passive affiliation: CIIE serves as the fund's anchor, providing a proprietary pipeline of deep-tech startups emerging from the institute's incubation programs, and the fund often acts as the first institutional cheque for these ventures.

The fund's primary geographic focus is India, and all known portfolio companies are incorporated in India. However, the underlying technologies — spanning enterprise software, UAV platforms, computer vision, and clean energy — are built with global use cases in mind, and several portfolio companies pursue international licensing or export strategies.

The fund writes first-cheque equity investments typically ranging from $500,000 to $5 million, targeting pre-seed through Series A rounds. The firm reserves capacity for follow-on participation in subsequent rounds where the original technology thesis remains intact.

A significant portion of deal flow originates through the CIIE incubation ecosystem at IIM Ahmedabad, where startups receive institutional support before encountering commercial VC. This provides BIF with early access to faculty-led spinouts and lab-stage technologies — deal flow that generalist Indian VC firms typically see only after ventures have already raised initial capital. The fund also reviews opportunities sourced through its co-founders' networks in the Indian deep-tech community.

The fund's mandate is explicitly centered on IP-driven deep technology. Its public portfolio and stated strategy indicate no exposure to consumer internet, social media, quick commerce, or other asset-light B2C models that dominate generalist Indian VC portfolios. The firm's de facto exclusion is any startup where technology defensibility is not the primary moat.