Garuda Ventures

Garuda Ventures is a San Francisco-based first-check venture capital fund founded in 2018 by General Partners Rishi Taparia and Arpan Punyani. Taparia was an early employee at Poynt (acquired by GoDaddy in 2020) and previously an investor at Matrix Partners, where he made the seed investment in Canva. Punyani spent over eight years at Okta across inorganic growth, M&A, and strategic partnerships, helping the company grow from roughly 200 employees to its 2017 IPO. The firm closed its debut fund at $31 million to invest in B2B software companies. Garuda leads initial financing rounds at the pre-seed and seed stages, investing $500,000 to $1.5 million per company and targeting 25 to 30 companies per fund. The firm organizes its investment activity across four themes: Intelligent Applications (apps and APIs), Commerce Infrastructure (fintech and commerce), The New Perimeter (security and infrastructure), and Climate 2.0. The portfolio of 44 companies is heavily AI-weighted, with eight of ten new investments in 2024 being AI-native. Notable portfolio companies include Airbase (spend management), Stax (African fund transfers), Evergrow (climate project financing), and Dashworks (AI workplace search, acquired by HubSpot). Recent investments include Archive Intel (AI compliance for financial services), Starboard (AI-native freight software), Arcade (AI agent authentication), and Mastra (open-source TypeScript AI agent framework). Garuda positions itself as a founder's first true believer, offering active operational support alongside capital. The firm publishes a monthly newsletter on Substack and maintains a focused, high-conviction portfolio where each company benefits directly from both partners' operator backgrounds in enterprise software and growth-stage company building.