Elevation Capital is a Gurugram-based early-stage venture firm founded in 2001, originally operating as SAIF Partners before rebranding in 2020. The firm is one of India's most tenured venture institutions, having backed more than 150 companies over nearly 25 years and produced more than a dozen unicorns including Paytm, Meesho, Swiggy, and NoBroker. Fund IX marks a deliberate strategic reorientation around India's AI platform shift, the firm's clearest thesis statement since inception.
Elevation backs seed and Series A founders in India building AI-native products across consumer, fintech, enterprise, healthcare, and frontier tech.
Fund IX targets the application layer, founders wrapping frontier models into products with genuine distribution and workflow lock-in, rather than capital-intensive foundation model training.
The firm's conviction is that India's structural advantage in the AI era lies in hard on-the-ground execution and software engineering depth, not model training competition with US and Chinese labs.
Priority verticals include financial services, healthcare, and education, large, structurally underserved categories that remain unsolved for most of the country.
Elevation Capital Fund IX closed at $500M in July 2026, targeted exclusively at seed and Series A.
Combined with the $400M Elevation Holdings growth vehicle launched in August 2025, the firm carries approximately $900M in fresh deployable capital, more combined than Fund VIII ($670M, April 2022) despite Fund IX being smaller on a headline basis.
Fund IX historically writes checks of $2–5M at seed and Series A.
LP composition is not publicly disclosed; the firm highlighted returning investors who have backed it since inception.
Leadership
Ravi Adusumalli is Co-Managing Partner, who has led the India franchise since the SAIF Partners era and is the firm's founding steward.
Mukul Arora is Co-Managing Partner, IIM Lucknow graduate and recipient of the Economic Times Midas Touch Award.
Mridul Arora is Partner, focused on fintech and financial services.
Vaas Bhaskar is Partner.
Chirag Chadha is Partner. Krishna Mehra is Partner, a former Meta executive and co-founder of Capillary Technologies, bringing operating and AI product depth. Deepak Gaur serves as Venture Partner.
Investment Strategy
Elevation writes $2–5M initial checks at seed and Series A, targeting meaningful ownership positions and holding for the long term.
Fund IX is structurally separated from the $400M Elevation Holdings growth vehicle, allowing the firm to size checks and reserves differently for each stage rather than blending early and growth capital in one pool.
The firm runs Basecamp, an annual week-long convening in Bengaluru for builders across India, as a community and sourcing platform. Post-investment support spans a founder-success function, hiring, go-to-market, and continuity of capital through the Elevation Holdings vehicle for later-stage rounds.
Notable Investments
Notable Exits
Ravi Adusumalli — Co-Managing Partner
Mukul Arora — Co-Managing Partner
mukul@elevationcapital.com
Mridul Arora — Partner
mridularora@elevationcapital.com
India
