Chetan
Puttagunta

There is a podcast episode titled "Chetan Puttagunta (GP, Benchmark) knows where to get gulab jamun in Scotland." This is, improbably, both completely true and a more accurate portrait of the man than his Forbes ranking. The dessert is the tell. The investor who will track down an Indian sweet in Edinburgh is the same investor who backed MongoDB in 2011, when the enterprise software establishment was still treating databases like sacred relics that must not be touched by open-source hands.

Puttagunta grew up in Quince Orchard, Maryland - not Atherton, not Palo Alto, not the feeder-school pipeline of prep-school-to-Stanford that produces so many Bay Area careers. His parents were chemists who had emigrated from Hyderabad. He went to Stanford for electrical engineering. He graduated in 2007, into a financial crisis that was still loading. He took a job doing technology M&A at Houlihan Lokey, then moved to H.I.G. Capital. Conventional innings.

The unconventional part started at New Enterprise Associates in 2011. He joined as an investor focused on enterprise software and immediately developed a view that most of his peers did not share: that open source was not a liability or a charity project but the actual distribution mechanism of the next generation of software. Developers were the new buyers. Communities were the new sales teams. The product had to be genuinely good before a salesperson ever knocked on a door.

He put this thesis into practice across a cluster of companies that, viewed from 2026, look almost too good to be true: MongoDB, MuleSoft, Elastic. Three open-source infrastructure companies. Three successful IPOs. MuleSoft was acquired by Salesforce in 2018 for $6.8 billion - NEA was the largest shareholder. Elastic went public the same year. Puttagunta was on the board of all three and had championed each investment when the prevailing view was that giving software away was not a business model.

The Benchmark Chapter

In July 2018, the same month MuleSoft closed its Salesforce acquisition, Puttagunta joined Benchmark as a General Partner. He was 32. Benchmark is not a place that makes many hiring decisions. The firm has operated for decades with a small, tight partnership - no associates, no analysts, GPs only. Being invited in at 32 was the sort of thing that happens rarely enough that people noticed.

His mandate at Benchmark was not formally defined, but his pattern since has been consistent: enterprise software, developer tools, infrastructure, open source, and increasingly AI at the foundational layer. Airbyte for data integration. Modern Treasury for payment infrastructure. Duffel for travel APIs. LangChain for LLM tooling. Legora for AI legal tech. Each of these bets follows a recognizable logic: a complex domain, developers as the initial wedge, a business model that accretes over time.

The AI Moment

In late 2024, Puttagunta appeared on Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy alongside an anonymous public markets investor known as "Modest Proposal" to discuss AI scaling - capital, compute, what the inference cost curves actually mean. His assessment was direct: the current AI cycle is "absolutely real" and "perhaps the biggest innovation cycle" he has been part of as an investor. This is not hedged language from a man who has now been in venture capital for fifteen years and has seen multiple cycles.

When DeepSeek released its R1 model in January 2025, Puttagunta posted something that cut through the hand-wringing: "DeepSeek being open source/open weights means that developers in the US can get access to DeepSeek R1 inference from American inference providers today at less than $10 per 1M tokens or self host, fine tune, etc if they require. It's hugely beneficial for developers." Where others saw a geopolitical crisis, he saw a developer unlock.

The portfolio has moved accordingly. LangChain, the de facto framework for building LLM applications. Mercor, AI recruiting. HeyGen, AI video. ClickHouse, analytics infrastructure that handles AI-scale data. And then Starcloud - perhaps the boldest bet. A company building data centers in space to solve the energy bottleneck that threatens to slow down the entire AI compute stack. Benchmark led the $170 million Series A in March 2026, at a $1.1 billion valuation, seventeen months after Starcloud came out of Y Combinator. Fastest YC unicorn ever.

The Board Philosophy

Puttagunta has been unusually candid in interviews about what it means to be a good board member. The line that comes up most often: "Your reputation is made by both how you behave and how supportive you are as a board member in both the good times and the times when things feel like they're going sideways." This is not the typical VC wisdom, which tends to emphasize picking winners. He's describing the work of the hard moments.

His close working relationship with fellow Benchmark partner Eric Vishria - they podcast together, co-present, and describe a genuine enjoyment of the collaboration - speaks to the culture he operates inside. Benchmark has historically been a place where the partners genuinely like each other. It is not a firm built on hierarchical partner structures or institutional scaling. That culture either fits you or it doesn't. Puttagunta is clearly someone it fits.

The Man Behind the Midas List

The Forbes Midas List measures investor returns. It is a useful signal but an incomplete portrait. What it does not capture is the version of Chetan Puttagunta who posted on X about the gulab jamun he tracked down somewhere in Scotland, or who admitted on a podcast to laughing at inappropriate times, or who tracks cost-per-lego ratios as a personal metric. These are not performed eccentricities. They are the texture of a person who happens to also manage capital at one of the most selective firms in the world.

He has 105,000 followers on X (@chetanp) and no personal website. He joined Twitter in March 2009. His bio lists "gulab jamun enthusiast" as a defining credential. He has posted, without apparent irony, that he would prefer to receive gulab jamun tweets over software tweets. For someone whose entire professional life is software, this is either deeply self-aware or genuinely unhinged. Probably both. The best investors usually are.