Varun Gupta
General Partner at Caffeinated Capital
New York, New York
Overview
Work Experience
General Partner
2020 - Current
We partner with founders as early as possible and invest throughout the life of the company. We have invested in fintech (Affirm, Aven, Brex), proptech (Opendoor, Divvy Homes, Loft), enterprise (Airtable, Deel, Docker, Notion, Playground AI), insurtech (AgentSync, Federato, Pathpoint), life sciences (BioAge, Ganymede, Spring Discovery), healthcare (Clipboard Health, Color, Virta Health), climate (Gravity, Impulse, Regent), and defense (Onebrief, Hadrian, Saronic, Varda). We're aggressively openminded and strive to be your most impactful investor.
Caffeinated Capital is a technology venture capital firm that partners with founders at the inception stage.
Investor, Board Member
2024
Invested in seed and led Series A. Acquiring and developing critical aerospace and defense products, then scaling them to deliver what the industry needs next. Founded by Jai Malik and Eli Giovanetti.
Investor
2023
Led Series A. Rebuilding the United States Navy from the surface up, beginning with small autonomous surface vessels. Founded by Dino Mavrookas, Rob Lehman, Doug Lehman, and Vibhav Altekar.
Saronic designs and manufactures unmanned surface vehicles for maritime security and domain awareness.
Raised $245,000,000.00 from 8VC, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Silent Ventures, Elad Gil, Caffeinated Capital and NightDragon.
Investor, Board Member
2020
Led seed and Series B. Reducing the cost of P&C insurance by tying actuarial science with underwriting operations and outcomes. Founded by William Ross and William Steenbergen.
Federato provides a RiskOps platform that streamlines underwriting processes for insurance carriers, MGAs, and MGUs.
Raised $80,000,000.00 from Pear VC, StepStone Group, Caffeinated Capital and Emergence Capital.
Helper / investor
2020
Helper / investor in companies like: - Aven: reducing the cost of capital for all Americans (co-led seed and led Series C) - Varda: micro-gravity enabled life sciences company (co-led Series A and led Series B) - Onebrief: the operating system for the military, beginning with planning (led seed and Series A) - Antares: mass-producible microreactors for defense applications (led seed and co-led Series A) - 8Flow: autonomous agents learning and completing your workflows (led seed and Series A) - XN: reducing P&C insurance costs through self-insurance and securitization of risks (led seed) - Stealth: exploiting the chicken egg to produce highly valuable complex proteins (led seed) - Axiom Health: a platform for precision neurobiology based on data that mirrors the CNS (led seed) - Astral: an integrated, high-performance toolchain for Python development - Comity: erasing volatility in electrical power markets with novel financial products (led seed) - Ganymede: recreating economies of scale in drug development (invested in seed, led Series A)
Data Science / Machine Learning
2017 - 2019
Tech lead and ML engineer for new production underwriting systems, generally learned how to be a productive person, and met some great colleagues
Affirm is a financial technology services company that offers installment loans to consumers at the point of sale.
Raised $2,020,000,000.00 from PGIM Fixed Income.
Startups
2013 - 2016
Software at Expanse (~25 employees, eventually acquired by $PANW, which I had nothing to do with), Wealthfront (~75 employees), and Elementum (~50 employees, supply chain software)