early-growth
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Touring Capital Is Betting $330 Million on AI After the Demo
The young San Francisco firm is skipping the loudest layer of the AI boom. Its wager is that the durable money will be made by software that fixes costly, stubborn work.
The Small-Portfolio Bet Behind Mendoza Ventures
The Boston firm is trying to prove that a venture fund can stay institutional, stay hands-on and still widen the door. Its method is unusually finite: three technical sectors, a 12-to-15-company portfolio and more contact than a quarterly board meeting.
Product-Market Fit Is the Easy Part
Greenfield Partners, a TPG spinout running about $1 billion out of Tel Aviv and New York, invests at the exact moment most startups stall - and treats the climb from Series B to scale as an engineering problem, not a leap of faith.
Nagraj Kashyap
Nagraj Kashyap is co-founder and General Partner of Touring Capital, a San Francisco-based venture firm that closed a $330 million Fund I in September 2025 focused on AI-powered SaaS companies at the early-growth stage. He brings 20+ years of venture capital experience, having previously founded Qualcomm Ventures (2003), launched M12 (Microsoft's venture arm, 2016), and served as Managing Partner at SoftBank Vision Fund II. His portfolio includes breakout companies such as Zoom, Waze (10x return, acquired by Google), Xiaomi, Cloudflare, Fitbit, Kahoot!, Livongo, and Outreach.
Samir Kumar
Samir Kumar is Co-Founder and General Partner at Touring Capital, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm that closed its oversubscribed $330 million Fund I in September 2025 to back AI-driven software companies approaching product-market fit. Before co-founding Touring Capital in 2023 with Nagraj Kashyap and Priya Saiprasad, Samir spent years at Microsoft's M12 venture fund investing in AI, deep tech, and hardware-enabled software, and prior to that held senior roles at Qualcomm's corporate R&D division, Samsung, and Palm. A Cornell-trained mechanical engineer who grew up in New York after being born in New Delhi, Samir brings a rare blend of hands-on engineering, product management, and institutional investing experience to backing the next wave of AI-powered enterprise companies.