GSF India

Rajesh Sawhney, the founder and General Partner, has final investment authority. He draws on relationships with operating partners including Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma and Beenos founder Teruhide Sato, who co-underwrite selected deals. The group operates without a formal investment committee, consistent with a syndicate-based decision model common among India's operator-led accelerators.

Sourcing runs through Sawhney's position as a board member at TiE Delhi and his founding tenure at Times Internet, which gives him visibility into early-stage digital media and enterprise spins. Teruhide Sato surfaces cross-border Japanese and Southeast Asian opportunities, while the Paytm and IndiaMart founder networks frequently push referrals before deals reach competitive institutional rounds.

GSF India is an asset manager that behaves more like a curated capital syndicate than a conventional venture fund. Capital comes from founder-partner balance sheets, institutional vehicles arranged through co-investor IvyCap Ventures, and opportunistic co-investments from the broader network, rather than from a single committed fund pool with fixed LP stakes.

The firm's primary deployment is direct seed and early-stage equity. There is no public record of GSF India allocating via fund-of-fund commitments to other managers, though the alignment with IvyCap Ventures creates an indirect exposure through institutional co-investment structures that function alongside, rather than as, traditional fund commitments.

GSF focuses on pre-seed and seed stages with selective follow-on participation in subsequent rounds. The accelerator heritage means it often enters at the idea or prototype phase, before institutional seed funds, and stays involved through early growth when the company intersects with later-stage partners like Paytm or IndiaMart.

No explicit exclusion list is publicly available. The firm's portfolio concentrates on enterprise software, fintech, Web3, and media-tech, while its principals' philanthropic and civic work in areas like sustainable urban planning (through I am Gurgaon) suggests hard-infrastructure or heavy-industrial bets fall outside the investing mandate.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma is listed as a business partner and frequent co-investor, not as a formal GP or LP in GSF India. The relationship predates Paytm's public-market journey and functions as a founder-to-founder capital alliance: Sharma co-invests in selected GSF portfolio companies and occasionally surfaces deals through his own network, but Paytm the corporate entity is not a limited partner in GSF vehicles.