Rohati Capital has closed its inaugural venture fund, Rohati Fund I, at $50 million, exceeding its original $30 million target. The Palo Alto-based venture platform was founded by former Amazon operators and is designed to give individual investors and family offices exposure to both venture funds and direct company investments.
Rohati Fund I is structured with approximately half of its capital allocated to a concentrated group of specialist venture funds and the other half to direct investments in companies.
Every direct investment comes through one of the managers Rohati backs, allowing the firm to combine fund diversification with direct exposure to selected portfolio companies.
The fund’s limited partner base includes 17 Amazon executives and alumni, 27 professional venture and private equity investors, 20 founders and CEOs, and eight CIOs across 16 countries.
Rohati’s portfolio includes fund positions in Union Square Ventures and Gradient Ventures, as well as early direct investments in SpaceX and PayJoy.
The strategy is intended to provide diversification across vintages, geographies and investment approaches while avoiding what Rohati views as the additional fee layers and longer paths to distributions associated with traditional fund-of-funds structures.
Rohati’s founding team traces its operating experience to Amazon, where several of its partners built and led Amazon Lending.
Launched in 2014, Amazon Lending used machine learning to underwrite marketplace sellers that could be overlooked by conventional credit scoring systems.
The business extended more than $1.5 billion in credit across the U.S., U.K., India and Japan within two years of launch.
Managing Partner Nick Talwar launched and ran Amazon Lending before holding senior roles at Visa, Uber and CircleUp.
At Visa, he ran the company’s North American credit card business, which represented roughly one-quarter of Visa’s revenue.
Talwar later served as Uber’s division executive for vehicle supply globally, covering financing, rentals and fleet management, and became CEO of the company’s U.S. leasing business.
Rohati’s other investing partners include Jason MacRae, Steven Himmel, K.V. Dhillon, Charles Elkan and Alen Rakipovic.
MacRae previously served as director of research science at Amazon, where he built models behind Amazon Lending and later succeeded Talwar as general manager of the business. He subsequently became Chief Data Officer at Capital Group.
Himmel previously served as Senior Managing Director at HighPost Capital and was earlier a partner at Vanterra Capital.
Elkan was Amazon’s first Fellow and led the company’s core machine learning team before later becoming Global Head of Machine Learning at Goldman Sachs.
Rakipovic worked on large-scale AI systems at Amazon and later on AI infrastructure and advertising models at Meta. He currently serves as a principal engineer at Stripe.
Rohati said its access to venture managers and direct investments is built primarily through relationships its partners developed as operators, investors and board members.
Most of the firm’s exposure is currently concentrated in the U.S., particularly Bay Area venture managers and artificial intelligence companies.
Outside the U.S., Rohati generally invests through local specialist funds, with India representing its largest international market.
KEY QUOTES:
“We saw the same pattern in venture that we saw at Amazon: a category that works, but best at the very top, and mostly for people who already have a way in,” said Nick Talwar, Managing Partner of Rohati Capital. “We built Rohati so individual investors can get the economics and the path to distributions of a direct fund, with diversification across vintage, geography and strategy, assembled from the best ideas of managers we have worked alongside for years.”
Nick Talwar, Managing Partner of Rohati Capital
“Nick has been an extraordinary mentor to me over eight years of PayJoy’s history,” said Doug Ricket, CEO of PayJoy. “I still don’t know what he saw in us in those early days, but his counsel through a 500-fold increase in revenue gave me perspective and encouragement, and helped me become the leader I wanted to be. Nick sees the potential in the businesses and people he mentors—he has always pushed me to think big and never to be afraid to speak boldly about my ambitions to change the world.”
Doug Ricket, CEO of PayJoy
“At Gradient, we work closely with AI founders on the technical, product, and scaling challenges of building enduring companies,” said Darian Shirazi, General Partner at Gradient Ventures. “Limited partners with deep industry experience make that work stronger. The Rohati team’s experience building and applying machine learning at Amazon gives our founders access to a rare operator’s perspective—and gives Gradient a distinctive advantage as we help the next generation of AI companies grow.”
Darian Shirazi, General Partner at Gradient Ventures
