Venture capital firms are moving onto college campuses in search of their next investments, encouraged by a growing pipeline of student-led startups and early successes from funds that began backing such founders several years ago.
Campus Fund, which focuses on student entrepreneurs, is in the final stretch of raising its third fund, a $100 million vehicle that was around ₹850 crore when the firm started raising it last year. The fund is significantly larger than its previous two funds combined. The firm has already completed its first close and is building a portfolio of about 60 companies, all of them student-led startups.
The fundraise comes as other venture capital (VC) firms increasingly look to colleges and university incubators for early-stage opportunities, a shift that Campus Fund founder and chief executive Richa Bajpai says has followed the success of student startups backed by her firm.
“When we started out in 2020, other fund managers were sceptical, but as they’ve started seeing success stories, its given them the courage to invest in their follow-on rounds. Now they’ve started thinking about going in early themselves and start looking for these companies really early,” said Bajpai in an interview with Mint.
Several Campus Fund portfolio companies, including EtherealX, Sarla Aviation and Digantara, have since raised sizeable up-rounds. Other portfolio companies include Banza, Expand My Business, Raaz, D-Nome and We360.
The shift is also visible at college incubators, where venture investors are increasingly turning up for demo days showcasing student-run startups.
At Masters’ Union’s demo day earlier this year, funds including Titan Capital, Kae Capital, DSG Consumer Partners, Trifecta Capital and 3one4 Capital were present. Eighteen startups presented at the college’s demo day received cumulative commitments of ₹4 crore, with Guardex, Nexo, Crefio, Oohlala and The Malleswaram Café receiving the most funding.
Similarly, Atlan, formerly SocialCops, was part of BITS Pilani’s student-accelerator programme Conquest. The San Francisco-based company, which builds the context layer for enterprise artificial intelligence (AI), was last valued at $750 million in 2024, according to Tracxn.
The approach is not limited to dedicated student-focused funds. GrowX Ventures, for example, wrote an early cheque to Pixxel when founders Awais Ahmed and Kshitij Khandelwal were in their fourth year of college. Maya Research founder Dheemanth Reddy started his company soon after graduating and raised $2 million from South Park Commons.
Antler India has backed several Indian founders who have either recently graduated or have dropped out of college to build their startups. Some of their portfolio companies include Aspera, which is building long-range unmanned airplanes and Dodge AI, which is building AI agents for enterprise resource planning maintenance. Dodge was part of Accel’s Atom’s programme which is co-funded by Prosus.
“The biggest change we’ve seen over the last three years is how student founders are now going after really hard, deeply technical problems,” said Nitin Sharma, founding partner at Antler India. “They’ve grown up digitally, in a different India. They’re not burdened by old expectations of careers. They don’t believe in those scripts.”
A new deal pipeline
For Campus Fund, the growth in investor interest mirrors a sharp increase in the number of startups it evaluates. The firm assessed 4,300 companies in 2024 and 7,400 in 2025. So far this year, it has met with 4,500 student-led startups.
The firm’s model is different from that of traditional venture capital firms, which typically rely on their own networks or inbound pitches to source opportunities. Campus Fund instead recruits students to scout for startups.
It currently has 90 scouts across 25 universities. The scouts look beyond their own campuses for companies and founders.
With Fund III, Campus Fund plans to expand the network to 150 scouts, including in the US. The firm is not targeting founders who intend to build their businesses in the US, however.
“We’re not looking for founders who want to build their startups in the US. We want to back those who want to come back and build, like a ghar wapsi (homecoming),” said Bajpai.
Bajpai attributed the shift to the National Education Policy, launched in 2020, which she said has freed college and postgraduate students from being focused on just one specific stream, and to artificial intelligence (AI).
She said the policy has freed college and postgraduate students from being focused on just one specific stream, while AI has reduced the advantage once held by people with specialised knowledge. “The technology has made it such that knowledge is no longer the arbitrage. If you really want to learn on your own, you can, its your intent.”
Bigger fund, same first cheque
Campus Fund expects to close Fund III in the next few months and plans to invest in about 60 startups over the fund’s 10-year lifecycle.
The fund, for which fundraising began in 2025, is substantially larger than its earlier vehicles. Fund I, launched in 2020, was sized at ₹5.9 crore, or about $700,000, while Fund II was ₹103 crore, or around $12.5 million, when it began deploying in 2022.
The larger corpus will not mean substantially larger initial cheques. Campus Fund expects to continue writing first cheques of roughly ₹4-5 crore.
“We scaled up the fund for two reasons: rather than investing for two years and then going out to raise money again, we get four to five years to invest. Second, we will have significant money to follow on in our winners,” Bajpai said.
Fund III will invest across three broad categories: deeptech; consumer brands going global and consumer tech; and enterprise AI.