पाठशाला Pathshala · धन Dhan, Money · Lesson 09 · Start

Micro-VCs, seed funds and accelerators in India

Institutional seed money in India comes through four doors: micro-VCs, seed funds, accelerators run by large funds and pre-team residencies. Each wants different evidence, and each is opened most reliably by a founder it already backed.

Pathshala, The Founder Library · 11 October 2026 · 8 min read

Weathered blue doors set into an old rustic wall in Bengaluru. — Photograph: Aditya Oberai · Pexels

Somewhere between the angels and the Series A sits the first institution to back the company: a fund with a mandate, a partnership and a process. In India that institution now comes in four distinct shapes, and a founder who pitches the wrong shape at the wrong stage spends a quarter learning what one page could have said.

This lesson maps the four. What each kind of investor is, what it needs to see before it will commit, how to read the deal it offers as an investment rather than a badge, and the part that decides most outcomes: how to arrive at the partner’s desk through someone the partner already trusts. The figure in the middle shows why that last part dominates the rest.

Four kinds of institutional seed money

Micro-VCs. Small funds, usually run by two or three partners, that write the first institutional cheque into a company that may not yet have revenue. Their cheques are small, their decisions fast and their portfolios wide. The Mumbai firm 100X.VC describes itself as the first venture firm to invest in early-stage startups using India SAFE notes, the CCPS-based instrument it published, and reports 180 companies backed. The instrument matters as much as the cheque: a micro-VC on an iSAFE defers the valuation argument to the next round, which the lesson on [convertible instruments](/library/isafe-safe-and-ccd-choosing-bridge-instrument) takes apart.

Seed funds. Larger funds that lead priced seed and pre-Series A rounds, take a board seat or an observer seat, and expect to follow on. Blume Ventures, which calls itself a seed and pre-Series A fund, states that its investments typically range from $1.5 million to $3 million, about ₹12 crore to ₹24 crore, for a stake of twelve to twenty per cent, and that it invests in ten to twelve companies a year out of four to five thousand ideas pitched to it. Those two sentences are the whole economics of the category: a large cheque, a meaningful stake, and a very small number of yeses.

Accelerators run by large funds. Programmes that pair a seed investment with a cohort, workshops and access to the parent fund. Surge describes itself as a rapid scale-up programme for startups in India and Southeast Asia that combines $1 million to $2 million of seed capital with company-building workshops and global immersion trips. Accel Atoms is a pre-seed programme for Indian and Indian-origin founders building anywhere, offering up to $2 million, currently through an AI cohort and Atoms X. The best-known global version is Y Combinator, which invests $500,000 in every company it accepts, and only in companies incorporated in the US, Canada, the Cayman Islands or Singapore; an Indian company must flip its structure to take it.

Residencies that back people before companies. Antler describes itself as one of India’s largest pre-seed investors, with more than 115 Indian companies backed. Its AI residency in Bengaluru takes founders at the pre-launch, pre-product or pre-revenue stage, decides within three weeks and invests up to about ₹4 crore for eleven per cent. Alongside it runs an invite-only community for solo founders looking for a co-founder. This is the only door that opens before the team exists.

What each one wants to see

The four doors are not a ladder of prestige. They are a ladder of evidence, and each one asks for a different kind.

An empty railway platform in Bengaluru runs beside bare tracks under a long canopy. — Each kind of investor leaves from its own platform. A team on the wrong one waits for a train that is not coming. Photograph: Aparna Nair · Pexels

A residency is buying the founder before the company, so it wants evidence about the person: what they have built, shipped or sold before, how fast they learn in the first weeks, and whether they can recruit a co-founder of their own standard. A micro-VC is buying a founder and an insight: a specific customer with a specific problem, a reason this team sees it first, and enough early signal (twenty interviews, a pilot, a waiting list that converts) to believe the insight survives contact. An accelerator is buying the slope: it will judge you on how much changes between the first week of the programme and demo day, so it wants a team that ships weekly and measures what it ships. A seed fund is buying a path to Series A: a product in use, revenue or usage growing at a rate the [growth lesson](/library/growth-rate-is-the-only-number-that-matters-early) would call healthy, and a plan that turns its cheque into the metrics a Series A investor pays for.

Pitching the wrong door is the commonest waste of a raise. A pre-product team pitching a seed fund will hear that it is too early, which is true and unhelpful. A company with ₹50 lakh of annual revenue pitching a residency is offering more than the residency is built to price. Decide which evidence you have, and pitch the door that buys it.

Reading the deal behind the brand

Every one of these offers is an investment at an implied valuation, whatever the programme around it is called, and the arithmetic is the same as for any seed round: the cheque divided by the stake. Antler’s ₹4 crore for eleven per cent is a post-money of roughly ₹36 crore. Y Combinator’s standard deal is in two parts: $125,000 on a post-money SAFE for seven per cent, and $375,000 on an uncapped SAFE that converts at the lowest cap the company later agrees, so the price of the larger part is set by your next negotiation rather than this one. A micro-VC on an iSAFE sets a cap or a discount and no price at all. Put each offer through the [seed valuation](/library/seed-valuation-how-number-really-gets-set) figure before comparing them, and compare the founders’ stake after the round, not the brand.

Then ask what the programme adds that the cheque does not. A cohort of peers, a demo day attended by the parent fund’s partners, a network of customers, a follow-on habit: some of these are worth a lower price, and some are worth nothing to a company that already has them. The question for each is whether the next investor will treat the company differently because of it, and the honest way to answer it is to ask three founders from the last cohort.

The arithmetic of a partner’s attention

Blume’s numbers make the point better than any argument. Ten to twelve investments out of four to five thousand ideas a year is a yes rate of about one in four hundred. No deck changes those odds very much. What changes them is the route by which the deck arrives, because partners do not read four thousand decks with equal care. They read closely the ones that come from founders they have backed, co-investors whose judgement they trust and operators who have never sent them a weak company. Everything else is triaged by an analyst, at speed.

The figure turns that into a funnel. Set the number of funds on your list, the share you can reach through someone they trust, and your own guesses at the rates. The defaults are illustrative and deliberately simple: a warm introduction ten times likelier than a cold email to produce a first meeting, one first meeting in ten ending in a term sheet.

Two things fall out of it at the default rates, and survive most honest changes to them. With the whole list reached cold, even eighty funds produce four first meetings and well under one expected term sheet, which is why founders who mass-email two hundred funds so often end the quarter with nothing. And for a list of forty reached cold, moving a quarter of it to warm introductions produces more first meetings than doubling its length. The work of a seed raise is mostly the work of converting cold names into warm ones before the first email goes out.

A cold email asks a stranger to read carefully. A warm introduction asks a partner to trust someone they already trust. Only one of those requests is usually granted.

How to get a warm introduction

Map every fund to its portfolio. For each fund on the list, find two founders it backed in the last three years, ideally in an adjacent market. They are the strongest introducers a fund has, because a partner who ignores a portfolio founder’s recommendation risks the relationship that matters most to them.

Earn the introduction rather than asking for it cold. Ask the founder for twenty minutes of advice on their own raise, not for an introduction. Most will offer one at the end if the company is good; if they do not, the company is not yet good enough to them, and that is information too.

Write the forwardable email yourself. Three short paragraphs: what the company does in one sentence, the one number that shows it working, and what you are raising and why now. The introducer forwards it with a line of their own, and the partner reads your words rather than a paraphrase. Ask the introducer to check with the partner first; an introduction the partner agreed to receive is read differently from one that simply arrives.

Use the second ring. Angels who co-invested with the fund, lawyers and company secretaries who close its deals, and operators it uses as advisers can all make an introduction the partner will read. Platforms and programmes count as warm only if someone inside them knows you. Nobody who charges you a fee to reach an investor is a warm introduction.

A twelve-week map, kept on one sheet

Twelve weeks before you want to start the raise, open one sheet. One row per fund: the door it belongs to, its stated cheque and stake, the stage it actually invests at (read from its last ten deals, not its website), the partner who covers your sector, and two portfolio founders. Weeks one to four: meet the founders, on advice, and update the sheet with what they say about the partner. Weeks five to eight: ask for introductions to the funds that fit, one door at a time, starting with the ones where the evidence you have matches what they buy. Weeks nine to twelve: draft the forwardable email, rehearse it on two friendly angels, and fix the start date of the raise. When the raise begins, the [six-week process](/library/fundraising-process-six-weeks-not-six-months) takes over. Every Friday until then, one question: how many names on the sheet moved from cold to warm this week? If the answer is zero two Fridays running, the raise is not ready to start.

Nothing here is investment advice. Fund and programme terms are as each states them on its own site, checked on 11 October 2026; they change with every new fund and cohort, so confirm them with the fund before you rely on them.