InseadAlum Ventures

InseadAlum Ventures (IAV) is the first global venture fund dedicated to INSEAD alumni, founded in January 2017 by Deepak Shahdadpuri (MBA '98D) and Will Klippgen (MBA '03D). The fund is registered in Singapore with an additional office in Paris, and was created after the founders observed that many INSEAD entrepreneurs struggled to raise initial funding for their startups. IAV raised SGD $1 million from 17 INSEAD alumni who also agreed to serve as mentors to selected portfolio companies. The fund invests SGD 50,000 to SGD 200,000 per startup at the pre-seed stage, with the primary requirement that at least one co-founder must be an INSEAD alumnus. IAV deploys capital globally across all sectors with no geographic restriction. Portfolio companies include Switchee, a UK-based smart thermostat IoT startup that raised a GBP 480,000 seed round and was IAV's first investment; Felcana, a pet health monitoring company funded to launch its Health Monitoring Kit; and Different Dog, a premium chilled dog food brand in the UK that received investment in February 2019. Notable limited partners and mentors include Jani Rautiainen, co-founder of PropertyGuru, Southeast Asia's largest property portal, and Aloke Bajpai, principal founder of iXiGO.com, India's largest online travel search platform. IAV provides portfolio companies with mentorship from its 17 alumni investor base alongside capital, leveraging the global INSEAD network across finance, technology, and entrepreneurship. The fund's most recent tracked investments date to 2019, reflecting limited recent public deployment activity.