Together Fund

Firm Profile

What they are. “India’s first Operator-led, AI-first venture capital fund in the US-India corridor that partners with ambitious, purpose-driven founders” (firm site). Self-described origin: “We were founders who scaled companies across borders, and often wished for investors who really understood the journey. So, in 2021, we took a stand: we would be the partners we wished we had as founders.” Positioning is explicitly operator-led — the partners “in parallel with being founding partners of Together… run some of India’s most well-known SaaS startups,” which they argue makes them “uniquely qualified to help you beyond just putting in capital.” The recurring mission framing: help establish India as a “Product Nation.” ✅ (firm site + Medium Fund-II launch post)

Fund size / vintage / AUM.

• Fund I — $85M, launched 2021 (set up in Mauritius as a global fund). ✅ (Inc42, Moneycontrol)
• Fund II — $150M (“SaaS.AI”), first close July 2023, LPs from US + Asia. ✅ (Medium launch post, DealStreetAsia, Moneycontrol, Inc42)
• AUM ~$200M+ (firm site, current). ✅
• ⚠️ The firm has evolved its self-label over time — early press calls it “India’s first operator-led VC fund” / “SaaS-focused”; the current site leads with “AI-first” / “Building Iconic AI, Together.” The AI-first reframing is the current posture.

Stage focus. Seed and Series A (with an inception/pre-seed on-ramp via the AI Studio program — see below). Fund II stated 8-10 investments/year; Fund II targeted up to ~25 early-stage companies. ✅

Check size. $1M-$5M initial checks at seed/Series A (firm site + Fund-II launch post). The CRM notes **“$2-4Mtypical"\ast \ast forini{t}^{\prime }scontext—consistent(the$2-4M center of the stated $1-5Mband).⚠\stackrel{◯}{R}Thisisthecruxofthesizingquestionvsini{t}^{\prime }s$7M target — see Fundraise Relationship.

Thesis / what they back. B2B AI + SaaS in the US-India corridor. Stated Fund-II focus areas: “Gen AI, SaaS, enterprise software, developer tools, open source software, cloud-native infrastructure, and API-first businesses.” Manav Garg (Fund-II launch): “We had been investing in DevTools, SaaS and a few AI-based startups from Fund I and now the difference is that AI has come on top… within B2B, AI and SaaS are the main focus areas.” They explicitly court founders “with India in their DNA” building global-first companies, including from Tier-2/3 Indian cities (Surat, Lucknow, Nagpur). ✅

Structure / culture. Partnership (not solo-GP). Two Co-Founders & Managing Partners (Girish in the US, Manav in India), a Founding GP (Shubham Gupta, India), a GP heading the US/SF office (Lakshmi Shankar), plus a venture partner, investment team, and ops/finance. Decision gravity sits with the founding partners ^[inferred]. Distinctive culture assets: a founder/operator LP + advisor network of 150+ (BrowserStack’s Ritesh Arora, Unacademy’s Gaurav Munjal, Chargebee’s Krish Subramanian, Mad Street Den’s Ashwini Asokan, etc.) and SwarmSpace / Together AI Studio — a 12-week AI-founder accelerator (cohort from Apr 15 2025; ~$1M upfront, 11 weeks Bangalore + 1 week US immersion) with physical hubs in Bangalore, Chennai, and Palo Alto. ✅

Partners

• Girish Mathrubootham — Co-Founder & Managing Partner (US). Founder of Freshworks (FRSH, Nasdaq); stepped down as Freshworks Executive Chairman Dec 1 2025 to go full-time at Together. A US partner init has met (5/14, Palo Alto) — offering hands-on product help. ⚠️ Freshworks = AI-ITSM competitor (see Cross-check).
• Manav Garg — Co-Founder & Managing Partner (India). Founder/CEO of Eka Software (commodity-trading SaaS). Authors most of Together’s investment memos (Composio, Emergent) and runs the AI-agents content series.
• Lakshmi Shankar — General Partner (US), heads the San Francisco office. Ex-VP Product Strategy, Google Search (launched Search Generative Experience / AI Overviews); ex-Twitter exec (worked with Jack Dorsey); ex-IBM/EY. Joined Aug 2024. The other US partner init met 5/14.
• Shubham Gupta — Founding General Partner (India). Previously led SaaS deals at Matrix Partners India until ~2022.
• Sethu Chidambaram — Venture Partner (India). Investment team: Shivam R (Principal), Kaushik S (AVP), Devansh Swarup (Analyst). Finance/ops: Puja Singhvi (CFO), Harshitha S (Fund Ops), Ragunath Srinivasan (Finance Ops). (Per together.fund/team, 2026-05.)
• Avinash Raghava — co-founder of record (2021); left Apr 2023 to run SaaSBOOMi (now AIBoomi) as founding volunteer/CEO. Listed as a founder in early press; no longer operational at Together. ^[single-source for exact departure date]

Recent pre-seed/seed activity (Pass-1 sketch — ≤5 deals; exhaustive pull is Pass 2)

Cleanest Together-led / co-led signals:

• Emergent — **$7Mseed\ast \ast ,2024,\ast \ast TogetherLED\ast \ast (pre-YC).AI-native"cheetahcompany"—$10M ARR in ~2 months; later $23MSeriesA(Lightspeed,Se{p}^{\prime }25)\to$70M at $300M valuation (Khosla + SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Jan ‘26). Agentic/vibe-coding IDE. ✅ (Together’s own memo)
• Composio — **$4Mseed\ast \ast ,Jul2023,\ast \ast TogetherCO-LED\ast \ast w/ElevationCapital.Agentic-AI"skill/learninglayer";later$25M Series A (Lightspeed + Elevation). ✅

Portfolio-listed seeds (amount/role unconfirmed by primary press — single-source, verify Pass 2):

• Optexity (enterprise AI agents on workflow data, Seed 2025) · Runable (no-code AI workflow automation, Seed 2025) · ArchitectChips (AI agents for chip design, Seed 2025). ❓

Portfolio skews AI-infra/tools (16+) and applied AI (11): Composio, Emergent, Privado, Protecto, ScaleKit, Thesys, Togai, Zipy, Bytebeam, Securden, Metaforms, Jhana, Presentations.ai, Spendflo, Kula, Revenue Hero; healthcare (Confido, Rapid Claims, Spry Therapeutics). Full source-tagged data → /Users/sazzad14/seed-market-scan/firms/together-fund.csv.

Best data channels for this firm

• Together’s own site is unusually good: together.fund/portfolio tags every company by sector + stage + year; together.fund/perspectives publishes detailed investment memos (Composio, Emergent) that state role/conviction directly — best primary source for why they invested and (sometimes) round role.
• India tech press = best for fund-level facts + thesis interviews: Inc42, Moneycontrol, DealStreetAsia, Entrackr, YourStory, Business Standard (fund sizes, vintages, partner quotes). Girish + Manav give frequent on-record interviews.
• Deal amounts/leads: cross-check the company’s own funding press (BusinessWire/TechCrunch for the later rounds) — Together’s exact seed role can be understated by aggregators (they co-led Composio; aggregators may say “participated”).
• Weak channels: US-centric spines (The Venture Codex) under-cover India-corridor seeds; Tracxn/PitchBook stage labels are directional only. Verify role against Together’s memo or the company press.

Fundraise Relationship (init.inc)

• Sizing facts: Together’s typical check is $1M-$5M (CRM: $2-4M)\ast \ast vsini{t}^{\prime }s\ast \ast$7M target. At their typical size they cannot lead a $7M round alone. Together’s pitch is operator value beyond capital — operator experience, enterprise-workflow understanding, and SaaS-scaling playbooks. Girish built the canonical AI-ITSM/customer-support ICP from the inside (Freshworks).
  • ⚠️ Competitor-founder dynamic (asset AND risk) — surfaced: Girish founded Freshworks (Freddy AI / Freshservice), tracked in this wiki as a high-threat AI-ITSM incumbent competitor. See Girish’s page for the full asset-vs-risk breakdown. Relevant facts: (a) Girish fully exited Freshworks executive/board roles on Dec 1 2025 (no current fiduciary duty to Freshworks), (b) no Together portfolio company is in ITSM/helpdesk (no overlap precedent), and (c) a Freshworks-founder’s name on a cap table is social proof to enterprise IT buyers.
• Conversation log (newest first):
  • 2026-05-26 — Raise-open message sent to Girish + Lakshmi (post 5/14 meeting). Their $2-4Mtypicalvsinit$7M target noted.
  • Thu 5/14, 4:30pm, Palo Alto: Met both US partners Girish Mathrubootham + Lakshmi Shankar in person — very excited / pumped. Girish offered hands-on product help.
  • Intro via Alex.
• Mutual connections / warm path: Alex made the intro (connector; deepen in a later pass). Operator-LP network (BrowserStack, Chargebee, Unacademy founders) is a secondary warm-graph asset.
• Personal & rapport notes (firm-level): Founder-first, operator-led, conviction-before-metrics culture (“they choose partners who roll up their sleeves… back bold bets with conviction — before the metrics catch up”). Heavy India-pride / “Product Nation” identity; AI-native obsession (“cheetah companies”). They build community (SwarmSpace, Palo Alto hub) — relationship-driven and high-touch.
• Live stage: tracked in the CRM (Google Sheet) — not duplicated here.

Cross-check vs existing wiki

• ⚠️ Girish Mathrubootham is the founder of Freshworks — already in the wiki as a researched high-threat AI-ITSM incumbent competitor (research-freshworks-ai-itsm-incumbent; Freddy AI / Freshservice). This is the central cross-check: a competitor-founder is now an investor offering to help init.inc. Reconciliation: the Freshworks page describes Girish only implicitly as founder; it has no cap-table or investor content that contradicts this page. The conflict is surfaced here and on Girish’s page (per convention, NOT edited onto the Freshworks competitor page). Mitigating fact: Girish exited all Freshworks executive/board roles Dec 1 2025 — he is a former founder/shareholder, not a sitting Freshworks officer.
• No prior wiki mention of Together Fund, Manav Garg, Lakshmi Shankar, or Eka Software (grep 2026-05-25). Clean new entity otherwise.

Related

Girish Mathrubootham · Lakshmi Shankar · Freshworks (competitor — Girish’s company) · research-freshworks-ai-itsm-incumbent · Init Intelligence · Alex (connector) · Manav Garg · Shubham Gupta

Pass 2 deal pattern (2026-05-25)

Exhaustive ~18-24mo pull (Nov 2024 → May 2026). Full source-tagged data: /Users/sazzad14/seed-market-scan/firms/together-fund.csv (17 rows; net-new vs Pass-1 ≈ 12, plus 3 Pass-1 rows re-verified/upgraded). Triangulated against Together’s own portfolio grid + perspectives memos, India tech press (ETtech/Economic Times, Moneycontrol, Inc42, DealStreetAsia, CIOL, StartupStory), US press (Crowdfund Insider, fintech.global, TheSaaSNews), and PitchBook/Tracxn. Disambiguation note: “Together AI” (the Vipul-Ved-Prakash compute/inference cloud that raised $1B+) is a DIFFERENT entity — excluded; logged as a guard row in the CSV.

• In-window deals where Together LED or PARTICIPATED in a pre-seed/seed/early round = ~11 (Nov 2024 → May 2026), plus pre-window flagships (Composio Jul’23 co-led, Togai Mar’23 led, RapidClaims seed) kept for context.
  • LED (seed): Thesys ($4M,No{v}^{\prime }24),ConfidoHealth($3M, Dec’24), Gibran ($2.6M,Ju{l}^{\prime }25),Coreworks($5M, Mar’26) — 4 led seeds. Plus Capitol ($7M Series A, Aug’25) — Together LED (an unusual lead-a-Series-A move; flagged as A, not seed).
  • PARTICIPATED (seed/early): Presentations.AI ($3Mseed,Accelled,Ja{n}^{\prime }25),Optexity(undisclosedseedw/PearVC,2025),Runable(undisclosedseedw/Array/Climber,2025),Nex($2M seed, 2024), ArchitectChips (undisclosed seed, 2025), Chaotix.AI (undisclosed seed, 2024), RapidClaims ($8M Series A, Accel led, Apr’25).
• Seed lead-rate ≈ 4 of ~10 in-window seed-stage deals led (~40%) — and crucially, the led seeds are SMALL ($2.6M–$5M) and the participations are on either a larger lead-driven round (RapidClaims/Presentations.AI, Accel led) or undisclosed SwarmSpace/AI-Studio micro-seeds. Together is fundamentally a participant-class fund relative to a ~$7Mseed:whenTogetherdoeslead,i{t}^{\prime }sa$2.6M–$5Mseed,NOTa$7M round — even Capitol (its biggest lead, ~$7M)wasaSeriesA,notafreshseed.Togetherdoesnotanchora$7M seed alone in the observed record.
• Check/stage: stated $1M–$5M (some sources say up to $10M);theOBSERVEDled-seedcheckscluster\ast \ast$2.6M–$5M\ast \ast ,exactlymatchingtheCR{M}^{\prime }s"$2-4M typical.” SwarmSpace/AI Studio adds an up-to-$1M pre-seed on-ramp (Nex, Chaotix, ArchitectChips, Optexity, Runable look like AI-Studio-adjacent micro-seeds — amounts mostly undisclosed).
• Cadence: ~1 announced/disclosed deal every 1-2 months for the disclosed ones; many SwarmSpace/AI-Studio seeds are undisclosed, so true deployment pace is higher. Fund II ($150M) stated 8-10 deals/yr — consistent.
• Sector mix: ~all B2B AI — heavy on AI infra/tools (Thesys, Gibran, Composio, Emergent) and applied/vertical AI (Coreworks=finance reporting, Capitol=content, Optexity/Runable=agents/automation, Nex=CRM/sales) plus healthcare AI (Confido, RapidClaims) and one consumer (Chaotix gaming). Maps to the “SaaS.AI” / “AI-first” Fund-II thesis. Note: zero ITSM/helpdesk deals — corroborates the Cross-check above (no Freshworks-adjacent overlap in Together’s book).
• India-vs-US split: roughly half-and-half / blended US-India corridor. Pure-India: Thesys (Bengaluru), Gibran, Runable, Nex, Chaotix. US/blended: Confido, RapidClaims, Coreworks, Optexity, Capitol (YC S24), Composio, Emergent (Bangalore-origin but global). The corridor framing is real — most companies have India DNA + US go-to-market.
• Partner attribution: Manav Garg (India MP) is the visible deal voice — quoted on Coreworks, Gibran, Thesys, Composio, Emergent; he authors most memos. Shubham Gupta (Founding GP, India) is a board member on Runable. The US partners (Girish, Lakshmi Shankar) are less visible in deal bylines but Girish is the named init.inc relationship.
• Notable seeds: Emergent (the flagship “cheetah company” — $7MTogether-ledseed\to$300M val in ~15mo), Coreworks ($5M, the most recent led seed), Gibran (ex-DeepMind team), Thesys + Confido (the two clean in-window Together-led seeds).
• ⚠️ Data conflicts / disambiguation resolved:
  • Together AI (compute co) ≠ Together Fund (VC) — the $1B Together AI raise is excluded (different entity, founder Vipul Ved Prakash). Logged as a CSV guard row.
  • ArchitectChips (architectchips.com, Together-backed seed) ≠ ChipAgents ($74M/$50M Series A1 led by Matter Venture Partners, Feb’26 — Together NOT involved). Both are “AI for chip design” — disambiguated.
  • Togai is Together-LED but the round was Mar 2023 (portfolio page mis-tags it “2024”) → pre-window. Presentations.AI portfolio-tagged “2024” but announced Jan 30 2025 (Accel led, Together participated — NOT led). Portfolio-grid years are approximate; verified against press.
  • Composio = Together CO-LED (its own memo) / “lead” (Tracxn) — kept as co-led; pre-window (Jul’23).
  • Pass-1 ❓ rows (Optexity, Runable, ArchitectChips) upgraded to ⚠️ via PitchBook/Tracxn corroboration; amounts remain undisclosed (COULDN’T-GET on $ for the SwarmSpace/AI-Studio micro-seeds).
• Best data channels for THIS firm (confirmed in Pass 2): (1) India tech press — ETtech/Economic Times, Moneycontrol, Inc42, DealStreetAsia, CIOL, StartupStory — best for fund-level facts AND for Together-LED seed announcements with amount/date/role (they reliably say “led by Together Fund”). (2) Together’s own together.fund/portfolio grid (sector + stage + year per company) and /perspectives memos (Composio, Emergent, Gibran) — best for role/conviction, but year tags are approximate (verify dates against press). (3) PitchBook/Tracxn to recover co-investor lists + corroborate the undisclosed SwarmSpace micro-seeds (filled in Optexity/Runable investor syndicates). (4) US press (Crowdfund Insider, fintech.global, TheSaaSNews) for the US-corridor deals (Coreworks, RapidClaims, Confido). Weak: US-centric spines (Venture Codex) under-cover India seeds; SEC Form D only catches the US-incorporated ones; aggregators understate Together’s role on co-led/seed-then-bigger-round deals (recover via the memo). COULDN’T-GET: exact $ amounts for Optexity, Runable, ArchitectChips, Chaotix (undisclosed SwarmSpace/AI-Studio micro-seeds).