Whiteboard Venture Partners

Whiteboard Venture Partners is a Palo Alto, California-based early-stage venture capital firm founded in 2017 by Abhijit Solanki, who serves as Founder and Managing Partner. The firm's positioning is explicit: it partners with entrepreneurs 'when their ideas are still on the whiteboard,' meaning pre-product or earliest-product, and walks alongside them as they create, build and scale the next generation of consumer and enterprise companies. The mandate operates as a US-India bridge: most disclosed investments have been seed rounds into India-based startups with Indian-origin founders building global businesses, and the sector lens covers consumer brands, enterprise software, edtech, fintech and cybersecurity, which is also Solanki's professional specialty. It generally invests as a co-investor. Solanki's operator-investor profile is unusual: he began at McKinsey & Company advising growth-stage and Fortune 500 clients, joined VMware's Strategy & Corporate Development team, worked at Symantec, and most recently served as cybersecurity investment lead at NexStar Partners before launching Whiteboard. Check sizes are concentrated around a $500K sweet spot within a $100K to $1M range. The team is intentionally small at one partner with a portfolio of approximately 5 disclosed companies including DaMENSCH, the Indian men's premium clothing brand in which Whiteboard's most recent reported investment was in May 2024, Digiaccel in B2B education and training, an INR 12.6 crore round in April 2024 alongside Saama Capital and Whiteboard Capital, and REMITR in cross-border B2B payments. By partnering at the whiteboard stage, Whiteboard Venture Partners backs Indian-origin founders building global consumer and enterprise companies.