How to land a VC meeting in 2025? with Rahul Mathur (DeVC, Matrix, Verak) 🇮🇳

Ft. Rahul Mathur - Fundraising No B.S. guide

👋 Hey, I’m Abhishek, Co-founder of GrowthX, a community of 4,000+ top leaders in Indian technology companies. Welcome to the 290th edition of the GrowthX Newsletter. Each week, we bring you stories of great Indian businesses, consumer insights & curation of high-paying jobs. Not a subscriber? become one for free.

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In today’s edition, I have Rahul Mathur joining in. He is a founder-turned-VC. In 2020, he started Verak (raised money from YC, Sequoia Capital, and Lightspeed India). Verak was acquired by InsuranceDekho in 2023. After the sale, he became an active Angel investor in 2023. He has been a proud GrowthX member since 2022.

He decided to become a full-time investor by joining DeVC (a fund by Matrix India) in 2024, a pre—seed investment firm in India focused on Founder-First investing.

Rahul (on the far right of this picture) & I (in the middle) had one of the best chicken wings at the Zero1 Fest.

A few weeks back, I shared a meal with Rahul at the Zero1 fest by Zerodha, and one thing led to another. I wanted to understand his experience sitting at the VC side of the table after building for a few years as founder. We realised there is so much information asymmetry that still exists today— hence the edition.

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We cover 5 pieces of fund raising —

1. How do you raise money when you have no backing?

2. What’s the alternate path to raising VC money?

3. How small is India’s VC world?

4. What research to do before meeting a VC?

5. What decides whether an idea will get funded?

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Raising money as a first-time founder without a background is hard.

I’ve now been on both sides of the table, pitching 100 VCs for my company and having been pitched by at least 100 founders in the past year. Most founders find it difficult to raise money because of one of 3 reasons

1. Lacking a past successful exit

2. Lacking past top operator experience

3. Not having warm connections with a VC

Nothing I write here can you give (1) and (2) — so let us focus on the 3rd.

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What works? Relationships.

Relationships rule the world. Remember “No connect {today}” ≠ “Can’t have connections in the {future}” Connection requires relationship; relationship can’t be built overnight. In India, we’re used to getting the ‘handbook’, ‘guide’ or ‘cheat sheet’ - because that is how we have always tackled exams. Life is a bit different, but here is the cheat sheet for getting your VC connects at the age of 25.

Download this image HERE

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Does this work?

It worked for the guys at Cherry App (ex-Jupiter team) and got a lot of warm intros from their management team. It legit worked for another (stealth co) wherefounder is 23 years old and worked for 2.5 years at a Consumer Internet company (VC backed). His previous employers endorsed him fully in front of VCs due to his exceptional performance - made a ton of introductions for him & DeVC is now invested!

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I’ll share my own example.

In late 2019 / early 2020 — I was a random Indian student overseas, with no VC connections—I started writing a small Substack called InsurTech Tribe. In the process, I spoke to a bunch of Tier 1 VCs who were exploring insurance investments LONG before I became a founder. Those were my connections when I decided to move back to India in late 2020 to start up.

Quick reminder — Abhishek & Udayan (GrowthX founders) themselves started by uploading YouTube videos & doing the GX community part time online before raising a round of funding.

This content → community → commerce (revenue) playbook doesn’t need VC money. Just needs you to invest the time & play the long game.

Founders generate resources — connections are also a resource.

To be a founder, you will likely have to fundraise. To fundraise, you will require connections—you must invest in building relationships TODAY. The golden rule of being a founder is to always end each meeting by asking, “Who else should I be speaking to? And, why?” This has opened up so much surface area for luck.

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The alternate path to raising 1st round

Especially as a young founder, your options aren’t limited to going to VCs. You have 3 interesting options that do work —

1. The young founder focused grants

   1. WTF Fund by Kamath brothers

   2. Lossfunk (by Paras Chopra)

   3. DPIIT Startup Grant

   4. CIIE incubation (IIM-A)
      

2. Accelerators

   1. Antler India

   2. Entrepreneur First

   3. 100X VC
      

3. Angels —

   Applicable only if you have worked at a VC-backed company for 18+ months.

   1. Ask your founder for intros to her/his Angels & VCs.

   2. Even Abhishek (this article's co-author) makes small angel investments—all founders want to pay it forward.

   3. The strongest signal for a VC is that founders who are themselves tight on money are willing to support a fellow founder, especially when the angel founder is from the VC’s own portfolio.

   4. You don’t need a warm intro for (a) and (b) — you need your skills!
      

4. Founders generate resources. My former engineer, Nakshatra, has moved to BLR and enrolled in Antler, mining my network and Antler’s network extensively to get introductions.

   1. Why is the ecosystem willing to help Nakshatra? Because he has the ‘proof of work’—built product, quit his job, came to BLR, put in the hours—he has prepared for it for the past two years—saving money, having tough conversations with his parents, etc.

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The VC world is really small.

There are approximately 750 to 1,000 investment professionals in Indian VC in total. Anything you share or say will be discussed. There are at least a dozen informal WhatsApp groups where analysts and associates of various venture capital firms indirectly discuss deals and share information one-on-one.

Some red flags to avoid —
You tell two venture firms different things. Do not use words like ABC Venture Firm is in serious evaluation with us when an analyst from that firm has spoken to you. That is not serious but exploratory.

Plus some harsh reality —
A typical venture firm would invest in less than 1% of companies — don't be surprised if you don't get a response or get a quick negative response on email from them. Most VCs rely on their own portfolio founders and network to send them high-quality deals—they seldom reply to cold DMs.

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If you do get a VC meeting, what research should you do?

1. Do they invest at the stage and the round size that you are raising?

2. Have they invested in companies in your sector and space before?

3. Are they actively investing?

4. What thesis have they put out in the last 3-6 months on social media?

5. Who are their most socially active investment team members? You can likely connect with them.

6. What do other founders say about the venture capital firm?

7. Think about using GenAI to help you with finding these answers.

   • Here’s a useful Grok prompt here for you to try.

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What decides whether an idea will get funded? (Seed/ pre-seed stage advice)

Different venture firms have different criteria. Every venture firm has something called a founder archetype, such as Educational background, Childhood upbringing, and Mannerisms.

Some venture firms invest only on the basis of the founder. Other venture firms invest primarily on the basis of their thesis. Some venture firms do a mix-and-match on a case-by-case basis of founder-first or thesis-backwards investing.

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When it comes to what decides whether a team will get funded at seed or pre-seed, there are a few simple criteria — Team, Traction, TAM & Thesis.

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1. Team (including founders)

1. What has been the trajectory of founders?

2. What is the referenceability of the founder at their past organizations, from a past employer, from past employees?

3. What is the quality of the early team and talent they are able to put together despite the lack of resources?

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2. Traction

1. Most venture investors will meet you a few times before offering a term sheet.

2. Traction means forward momentum across each interaction.

3. How does traction manifest?

   1. Product development

   2. Team build out

   3. Thesis maturity/thinking

   4. Network built out — channel partners, suppliers, etc.

4. The founder’s job is to generate resources, and the best tell-tale for someone who can generate resources is a person who is showing forward momentum & that too in spite of having a lack of resources.

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3. TAM (Total Addressable Market)

1. Adjacent markets can end up emerging.

2. What is initially a small TAM can lead to a dead TAM.

3. Very few businesses create markets.

4. Also, TAM is not as relevant as team and trajectory or traction.

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4. Thesis

Thesis means the investor has done the prep work, gone out into the market, spoken to industry experts, done some first principles, customer discovery etc to have an informed point of view on the space

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Closing thoughts.

The best founders are consistent at generating resources — network, following (not social media one), capital and knowledge — no one will open the doors for you, unless you do it yourself.

The idea of writing this post was to give you a compass for what you can do to build your own network so that one day, you can raise VC money (if required).

Remember: Start small. Even a serendipitous connection inside GrowthX could eventually lead you to people you will raise money from; why not start there?

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Want to read more? Here’s an article.

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