As of 15th October 2024
We started gradCapital to fund students with projects, many of them may not look like a company yet.
The main part of us funding people is the people itself. We look for certain attitudes, passion, and qualities that make us want to give you money. We also help them through cohorts to remove blockers in their lives and get them closer to their goals. It's a day-in-day-out job for us.
In the past 3 years, we have given $25k - $40k (not a large sum) to a few student teams:
- Airbound.co to build drones to deliver stuff, we funded Naman when he was 16 and still in school. He used our money to move-out of his parents house, and order supplies to make a demo. He is one of our first investments :). He later got funding from Lightspeed.
- Stimuler.tech to build AI to learn english. We met him when they were in 3rd year of college, and had a barely working demo without many users. Over time they grew to 300k+ users. Also raised a seed round from Lightspeed post gC.
- Nudgenow.com to build nudges for consumer companies. They actually ran out of our check, and then we reinvested in their project to keep them running. Now they are making good revenues :)
- Plutus.gg: Met Karata in 2022 when he was in 2nd year of college, and when we invested in him then. He really moved fast with his product. He later raised from a16z.
- Heltar.com: They started out by solving assignments for kids in international colleges, and made good money from it. They automated their WhatsApp to handle customers. Later they learnt that they could automate WhatsApp for many companies. We funded them in their final year of college. Now they hav 500 SMBs and few enterprises using their product.
- Ripen.in: Ritvik & Heet started to make a consumer app for adulting. They later pivoted to something in enterprise. Got funded by Rainmatter after gC.
- Dognosis.tech: Using dogs to sniff cancer (funded by 1517 fund)
- Slidely.ai AI for slides (also funded YC) - met Apoorve Singhal & @Nikhil in their final year of college. They pivoted to their new idea, and I believe in thier perseverance and instincts.
- Jhana.ai: AI for legal tech: anyone who has engaged with legal cases and lawyers, should know how useful this is (also funded by Together Fund)
One interesting pattern is that we funded most students when they hadn’t committed full time, and were still in college. We never really ask the student to drop out or be full time.
We also give grants to companies ($5,000) without anything in return. We don’t ask for a right to invest - but we may offer you an investment if we like you :) Out of 10 grants, we have invested in 7 grantees. That's a high conversion.
Some of the Atomic projects ($5000) grants are:
- Biocompute: Anagha is editing DNA to make a new device
- Arctus Aerospace: Shreepoorna is making UAVs for Indian defence
- Armatrix Automations: Snake like robot arms to inspect complicated areas
- Abhiyantr: Making robotic systems work through human language
The goal of our check is to make students test their super ambitious ideas. Ideas that may not have places in other funds or accelerators. Traction is not what we look for - we look at your passion, attitude, and clarity of thought.
We gave Anagha Rajesh $5,000 when she had a plan to go for a PhD. But she learnt after our grant that storage costs are becoming more expensive, and we may need an alternative soon. She wanted to explore storing data in DNA and use it to replace magnetic tapes of the world. Few months later we funded her with $40,000. She has written a blog of how she started here.
