Vaibhav Domkundwar has a complaint about his younger self: he spent too long being self-sufficient. For more than a decade, he built a business with the money it earned. There is an obvious satisfaction in that arrangement. No investor to persuade. No permission slip for the next experiment. But years later, having become an investor himself, he began counting the opportunities that discipline had quietly ruled out.
It is an awkward confession for an entrepreneur. Bootstrapping comes with an excellent publicist: the founder who did it alone. Domkundwar's memory is less tidy. He sees the freedom he had, and the possibilities he constrained. That tension runs through his career, from mechanical engineering in Pune to software in Silicon Valley to Better Capital, the venture firm he founded in 2018.
He has changed the way he works several times. He has also become unusually deliberate about where to stop changing. Better Capital's chosen territory is the beginning, when a company can still consist of a founder and a difficult question. The interesting part of his story is how much experience he has gathered to operate in a place with so little evidence.
A mechanical engineer gets an open canvas
Domkundwar grew up in Pune and studied mechanical engineering at the College of Engineering Pune. His father's education had been a much steeper climb: studying under street lamps, earning a doctorate at IIT Bombay, and eventually becoming dean of engineering at Pune University. It gave the son a close example of how far education could carry a person.
He went to the University of California, Berkeley, for his master's, studying there from 1996 to 1998. Berkeley widened the menu. He has described needing months to adjust to its freedom of thought after an upbringing in which an engineering qualification seemed to prescribe a particular kind of future. A degree could be a starting point for something else entirely.
There was a social change, too. The boy who remembered himself as an introvert became someone whose family could scarcely believe how much he talked. His rule for adulthood followed: “I believe everybody must reinvent themselves every five years.” It is a demanding schedule. Most people take longer to replace a sofa.
Mechanical engineering
Master's degree
Startup building
Return and reconnect
AngelList syndicate
Five founders. Then one.
His working life began with engineering and product roles at I2 Technologies and Corio. By 2000, he was a co-founder of Roamware, with responsibility for marketing. The business sold software to mobile carriers worldwide. It was a venture-backed undertaking with five founders, an education in the distance between a promising product and a paying customer.
Roamware was eventually acquired by the private equity firm Audax. Domkundwar's next business, Better, took a different shape: one founder, his own funding. Beginning in 2003, the venture developed into Better Labs, a startup studio. A marketing-data product called Ready was an early building block.
In his later recollection, the studio built ten products over roughly a decade. Six were discontinued; four survived. The arithmetic has more personality than a polished career biography. It records the work that went nowhere as well as the work that stayed. Software building supplied him with experiments, customers, and a growing suspicion that another product would not solve the problem of expanding his reach.
Hiring people to build products was possible. Hiring the commitment of an independent founder was another matter. Investing offered a way to work with people who already had that commitment, and to put his accumulated operating experience beside their ideas.
The return before the fund
In the summer of 2012, Domkundwar moved from San Francisco to India. He spent about a year learning the local startup scene and developing a network before accelerating his angel investing. Between 2014 and 2017, he invested in approximately fifteen companies, including Rupeek and Testbook.
Better Capital began in January 2018 as an AngelList syndicate. The structure let him bring other investors into deals and write larger checks than personal investing alone allowed. His early formulation covered companies building for India and companies building in India for customers elsewhere. Geography supplied the starting point; it did not fence in the customer.
The first-year portfolio also gives a useful correction to the image of a narrowly defined investor. It included business software and consumer companies, single founders and larger teams. He was looking for a market opening, then for people capable of pursuing it. A syndicate could assemble capital. The harder work was deciding which opening deserved it.
A Saturday call with a banking problem
One early conversation with Anish Achuthan, co-founder of Open, lasted two hours on a Saturday afternoon. Domkundwar recalled a discussion about the difficulties small businesses faced managing money across payments and accounts. He approached it through product experience: what would make the owner's working day easier?
That is a revealing connection. He had been a small-business founder himself. The appeal of a banking product could therefore begin with the nuisance of running a company, well before the abstractions of a financial-services thesis. Better's portfolio would include Open, Slice, Jupiter, and the infrastructure company M2P.
His public description of the approach starts with a short question: “what could go right?” It asks the investor to imagine a useful business before taking it apart. For someone looking at a company before it has much revenue, that imaginative work matters. There is little history available to do the arguing.
“what could go right?”
Vaibhav Domkundwar / on early investment decisions
The founder gets to check the investor
The relationships run in both directions. Pratyush Rai, CEO of Merlin by Foyer, described checking references with six founders before partnering with Better. All six gave favorable feedback. An investor may ask for a pitch, but a founder is also choosing a person who will remain on the ownership register after the presentation is over.
Deepanshu Arora, co-founder and CEO of Toddle, describes Domkundwar as someone he turns to with questions, and credits their conversations with influencing his thinking over the long term. Anish Achuthan recalls support while Open was still working through its idea and banking partnerships. These are accounts of access and practical discussion, the less photogenic part of venture investing.
Vinay Singhal, co-founder of STAGE, reaches for a film analogy: the founder directs, the investor produces. It is a flattering comparison, but it also leaves the creative responsibility in the right place. A producer can help a project survive its difficulties. The director still has to make the film.
Such accounts help explain the appeal of a former operator as an early investor. Product direction, selling, and hiring are familiar territory for Domkundwar. He can bring experience to a conversation while the founder carries the consequences of the decision.
A bigger fund can change the job
In November 2021, Better Capital announced a maiden institutional fund of $15.28 million. Its backers included current or former leaders at companies and institutions such as Google, Meta, Uber, LinkedIn, Tiger Global, and TPG. The planned investments remained at pre-seed and seed, with a median check of $300,000.
Success brought invitations to get bigger. Domkundwar describes repeated encouragement to raise more money and move toward later rounds. He chose to keep the firm's attention on the first investment instead. More money can require different checks, different ownership targets, and different companies. Eventually, the investor has acquired an impressive fund and a different occupation.
The decision has a personal counterweight. His regret about bootstrapping is a regret about restricting what a business could attempt. His reluctance to move up the funding ladder is about protecting the work he wants to do. Money is useful in both stories. The question is what accepting it makes possible, and what it asks him to become.
Better Capital's self-reported year-end 2025 figures. Assets under management measure the firm, not Domkundwar's personal wealth.
The mistakes make it onto the page
By the end of 2025, Better's reported portfolio exceeded 240 companies. Domkundwar also recorded 35 shutdowns and 18 mergers or acquisitions. He described deep engagement with about twenty to twenty-five companies at a time. Those figures suggest how the solo general partner model works: his attention moves toward particular decisions and moments.
His account of mistakes is more useful than a victory parade. He acknowledged underestimating regulatory exposure, assuming highly intelligent founders would also bring mature judgment, and backing new markets without sufficiently accounting for the difficulty of obtaining patient follow-on capital in India. Conviction, in this telling, needs correction mechanisms.
Writing down an error changes the next conversation. A founder can see the risks an investor has encountered, rather than merely the categories he hopes to fund. It also makes an annual letter a record against which later confidence can be measured. The past gets to keep its receipts.
Back to the software question
In September 2026, Domkundwar was thinking about what happens when software becomes much cheaper to produce. In his essay Infinite Software, he proposed that companies could expand across more of a customer's work, because the old cost of building adjacent products would no longer impose the same boundaries.
A separate essay, Own the Surface, examined the advantage of places where people already spend time, such as messaging services. A new AI interface might be easy to copy. Established habits and relationships could prove harder to displace. These are investment arguments, presented as his view of where durable businesses might emerge.
There is a familiar concern underneath both essays: how a product reaches a customer and earns a continuing place in the customer's life. It connects the engineer, the marketer, the studio founder, and the investor. New technology changes the available tools. Someone still has to make a product people return to.
Alongside the fund, he and Ruchi began the Domkundwar Foundation project in late 2024, focused on education, entrepreneurship, and sustainability. Their first steps included planting more than two hundred trees with 14 Trees. Another beginning, with a longer clock.
Domkundwar's career contains plenty of starts, and a fair number of things he chose to end. Better Capital puts both kinds of experience to work at the moment a new founder needs company. He has learned the pleasure of building with his own money, the cost of holding too tightly to it, and the value of choosing a job before choosing the size of the fund.