Nagraj
Kashyap

Nagraj Kashyap never meant to be a venture capitalist. He will tell you this himself. The man who wrote early checks into Zoom, Waze, Xiaomi, Cloudflare, and Fitbit started his working life as a software engineer - debugging code at Nortel, Motorola, and 3Com/US Robotics before trading the terminal for a management consulting desk at PRTM, now absorbed into PricewaterhouseCoopers.

In 2003, a door at Qualcomm opened. He walked through it as one of three people founding what would become Qualcomm Ventures. Thirteen years later, that three-person operation had grown to a 30-person global team managing $250 million in annual investments across a portfolio of 140+ companies. The Zoom check he wrote in those early Qualcomm years would eventually become one of the most celebrated early institutional bets in Silicon Valley history.

Then came Waze. Kashyap led the Israeli navigation startup's Series B. When Google acquired Waze in 2013 for over $1 billion, Qualcomm Ventures walked away with roughly a 10x return. One deal. Ten times the money. The kind of outcome that funds careers.

In 2016, Microsoft came calling. Not as an investor - as a founder. Satya Nadella's Microsoft needed someone to build a corporate venture arm from scratch. Kashyap took the title of Corporate Vice President and did in five years at M12 what had taken him thirteen at Qualcomm. M12 grew to 100+ portfolio companies across North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, and Australia. Investments included Kahoot!, CloudSimple (acquired by Google), and Livongo.

By 2021, SoftBank Vision Fund II came with a bigger canvas. Kashyap joined as Managing Partner, leading software and consumer investments including Go1, Netradyne, and Arkose Labs. Then, in September 2023, he did the thing that had never quite been the plan: he co-founded his own fund.

Kashyap co-founded Touring Capital alongside Priya Saiprasad and Samir Kumar - a team that collectively built careers at Qualcomm Ventures, M12, and SoftBank. The name lands somewhere between a touring musician's endless road and a grand European driving circuit. Either interpretation fits: the firm is built for the long game, going wherever the best early-growth AI software companies are.

The thesis is deliberately narrow. Touring is not betting on foundation models or infrastructure hype. Kashyap has been explicit: the firm targets "large, deep pain-point verticals" where AI-enabled software creates measurable value for workers. Fleet safety. Healthcare. Financial data. Legal workflows. Automotive dealerships. Senior care. Materials science.

The entry point is equally specific: companies at product-market fit, just before they need serious capital to accelerate. Early growth, not early stage. The investors see what founders have actually built before writing the check - which, after 20+ years of pattern recognition across 300+ companies, makes for a different kind of conviction.

September 2025 delivered the validation: Touring Capital closed its first fund at $330 million - oversubscribed - with backing from global institutional LPs, family offices, and over 30 former founders who had worked directly with the Touring team across their prior careers. That last group is telling. When founders write LPs checks into the fund of the people who backed them, the endorsement is operational, not just financial.

Within two years of founding, the firm had made 12 investments, hit one unicorn, and recorded one successful exit: SafeBase, acquired by Drata just 10 months after Touring led its $33 million Series B. Five portfolio companies - Netradyne, Daloopa, Numa, Cusp, and Exaforce - announced up-rounds. Half of the portfolio is led by founders Kashyap and his co-founders had previously backed elsewhere.

Kashyap does not use the word "revolutionary" about AI. He uses the word "wealth-creating." That distinction matters. He has watched enough technology cycles - mobile, cloud, SaaS - to know that the early frenzy rarely maps to the eventual winners. "Bubbles form during the early parts of a tech flash function," he has said. "AI will be very, very wealth-creating for the economy. It's just in the beginning, so everybody sort of rushes into the gold rush it is now. So we've picked our spots on the app side."

The "app side" is deliberate. Touring avoids foundation model investments and infrastructure plays at the hype layer. Instead, the firm looks for vertical SaaS companies using AI to drive concrete productivity gains - the kind of outcomes a CFO or COO can put in a quarterly report. Netradyne uses computer vision and AI to improve fleet driver safety. Numa is building AI tools for automotive dealerships. SafelyYou predicts and prevents falls in senior living communities.

What Kashyap looks for in founders maps closely to what he has internalized across three decades of watching companies succeed and fail: adaptability, deep people orientation, and an obsessive relationship with product. Not pitch decks. Products.

There is a pattern across Kashyap's career that holds across three different institutions with three very different mandates. At Qualcomm, a semiconductor giant needed a venture arm. At Microsoft, a software giant needed one. At SoftBank, a Japanese conglomerate needed a software-focused approach to Vision Fund II's enormous firepower. Each time, Kashyap came in near the beginning, built the team, the thesis, the portfolio - and compounded.

At Qualcomm it took 13 years to reach a $250M annual run rate. At Microsoft, five years for comparable scale. The compression is a signal: experience runs faster. So does the institutional knowledge of which founders to trust, which verticals to favor, and where the product-market fit signal is real versus manufactured.