Zeropearl VC, a solo GP venture fund led by veteran investor and IIT-Bombay alumnus Bipin Shah, has announced the final close of its maiden corpus at ₹159 crore (≈$18 million), after being oversubscribed more than 3.5x against an original ₹80 crore target.

Positioned for pre-seed and seed, the fund will run a highly selective model, backing roughly 0.5% of startups it evaluates annually and aims for performance in line with Shah’s realized IRR of 50%+ over the past decade. In today’s slower global VC climate, the thesis leans into India’s expanding startup base across Tier-2/Tier-3 hubs and frontier areas like AI, climate tech, and healthtech.

As Bipin Shah puts it: “159cr ka kaddu katega 45 startups me batega. No more katora, only Bipin ka Hathora (on founder’s head who don’t work hard). Zhakaas!”

The GP’s track record

Shah, formerly a Partner at Titan Capital, has 14+ years in early-stage investing, having assessed 50,000+ startups, met 5,000 founders, and invested in 250+ companies. His portfolio includes early bets on Mamaearth, Credgenics, InVideo, Giva, and CityMall, with notable exits such as Beardo (Marico), Oziva (HUL), and SuprDaily (Swiggy). He credits his five formative years with IIT-Bombay’s E-Cell and leading Eureka! for shaping a founder-first approach.

For founders at day-zero, a concentrated solo-GP vehicle with deep founder-LP networks can compress validation cycles, surface operating expertise quickly, and catalyze follow-on rounds, advantages that are particularly useful in capital-efficient markets where signal quality and speed matter most.

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