Where India's most exceptional builders start at -1
The most ambitious risk-takers and outliers deserve partners who'll back them before anyone else will. We commit capital, community, and conviction from day -1, so you can build what only you can.
Apply to Median India
The Vision
-1 to 0 isn't a side project
Whether you're building a company or deciding what the next ten years should look like, finding your life's work is hard. Like anything hard worth doing, it's better done alongside talented peers.
What is -1 to 0?
Ruchi Sanghvi
Founder and General Partner
Aditya Agarwal
General Partner
Prateek Mehta
General Partner
“We have the talent, the timing, the tools. What we need is unreasonable ambition. Let's build what only India can build.”
— Aditya Agarwal, General Partner
75+
Members
20
Portfolio Companies
$575M
Fund
Founders in India are ready to take risks. We see whitespace in India's early-stage ecosystem and a chance to redefine how technical talent thinks about building ambitious companies. Median is purpose-built for risk-taking, and we're helping secure the cultural shift toward high-risk, high-reward bets.
On RiskWhy India, Why Now
Why India, Why Now
Tenfold Increase in Talent
Two waves of Indian startups — Flipkart, PhonePe, Paytm, then Swiggy, Zomato, Ola — produced a generation of operators who've seen greatness up close. Their alumni have already founded 200+ companies.
Strong Brand Recognition
Binny, Ruchi, and Aditya together represent the two defining arcs of Indian entrepreneurship: foundational Indian tech companies, and building in the US at Silicon Valley scale. They're personally invested in Median India.
Platform for Technical Ambition
Median has the highest technical talent density of any early-stage community — by design. That rigor, plus our lineage in AI and deep tech, is what India's most technical founders are looking for.
Whitespace at Pre-Seed
India has good seed and growth firms — but no dense, high-quality communities at the pre-seed stage. There's clear demand for Median coming in at the early stage — to enable higher order ambition from day -1.
Policy Tailwinds
The tailwinds are structural. The Indian government is laying the infrastructure for a generational technology wave — digital public rails like UPI, ONDC, and OCEN, plus connectivity, capital markets reform, and founder-friendly regulation.
Connectivity to the Silicon Valley and NYC
Median India is a direct bridge to Silicon Valley and New York. Indian founders want to collaborate with the best technologists in the world — and most of the frontier AI work is still happening in the Bay Area.
India Portfolio Spotlight
Arctus Aerospace
HARD TECH | BENGALURU
Arctus unveiled their AX1: a tech-demonstrator UAV with a 20,000 ft cruising altitude, 50 kg payload, and 10-hour endurance, built in 150 days by a team of 10.
Zango AI
FINANCIAL SERVICES | GLOBAL
Zango is leading the conversation on AI governance in financial services. Recently, they convened senior financial leaders at the British Ambassador's Residence in Lisbon.
CentAI
HEALTHCARE | BENGALURU
CentAI's centre in Koramangala, Bengaluru is India's most advanced clinical prevention facility built around advanced early detection.
Maya Research
CONSUMER AI | GLOBAL
The voice interface for the next 5 billion people. Only Indian company on Global Speech Arena leaderboard competing against global labs, 450K+ Hugging Face downloads, 34M+ consumer conversations
Our Community
Meet the people building at Median India
Founders who've built at scale before, back for their next chapter.
Nandan Reddy
Co-founder of Swiggy, one of India's biggest success stories — which he and Sriharsha Majety built from a 6-person, 25-restaurant operation in 2014 to a public company that listed on the NSE and BSE in 2024. Before that, he built Galla, a cloud-based POS for restaurants, and co-ran Zurna, a Hyderabadi biryani restaurant. He's now at Median Fund, exploring his next chapter.
Aprameya Radhakrishna
Co-founded TaxiForSure in 2010, scaling it to a $200M acquisition by Ola in 2015, then launched Vokal, a user-generated content platform for Indian languages. He's now Founder & CEO of Koo, India's microblogging platform, and angel-invests in 35+ startups.
Shashank ND
Shashank founded and still leads Practo as CEO, India's leading integrated healthcare platform serving over a billion people's access to quality care. He chairs CII's Digital Health Subcommittee and sits on the Swasth Alliance board. He is also the co-founder of the Median-backed company Cent — India's most comprehensive scan for early detection.
Rajat Shikhar
Founded two startups — Figwish in personal care and beauty, and Buzzl in hyperlocal merchandise discovery — while also building product at Myntra, Jabong, and foodpanda. He co-founded DealShare as CPTO, scaling India's social-commerce platform for Bharat consumers to unicorn status with 5M+ monthly users across 120 cities in two years.
Drew Kirchhoff
Drew worked on algorithm research and growth at TikTok as both a data scientist and product manager, after co-founding yoli, an on-demand conversational language-learning service built for WeChat. He joined Median to build drop-in context for personalized AI services.
Gaurav Bhalotia
With nearly 24 years architecting large-scale distributed systems, Gaurav was VP of Engineering at Flipkart and later CTO of udaan.com, building India's B2B commerce infrastructure end-to-end. He explored his next venture at Median's first India cohort, and is now CTO of EY India, modernizing enterprise tech across tax, audit, and compliance.
Pathways
Membership Residency
6 months · No cost or equity · Ideation & Exploration
A talent-dense community of technical founders, researchers, and domain-experts testing each other's ideas, finding collaborators, and reaching conviction on what to build and how to build it.
Funding
$1M to $10M · Exploration & Conviction
Funding from $1M to $10M, for founders committed to building a venture-scale company. We're ready to write the first check, for exceptional builders from the Median community or the larger ecosystem.
What You Get With Membership
What You Get With Membership
Access to Funding
When you're ready, Median can lead or co-lead your pre-seed or seed round with $1M–$10M in capital. No pitch deck required — we already know you and your work.
Credits & Deals
Over $500K in credits from leading cloud, AI, and infrastructure providers including AWS, GCP, Azure, OpenAI, Anthropic, and more.
Peer Groups
Small, curated peer accountability groups that meet weekly. The highest signal environment for testing ideas, getting honest feedback, and finding collaborators.
Events & Workshops
Roundtables with industry leaders, technical deep-dives, demo days, and speaker sessions with founders, investors, and researchers at the frontier.
Office Space
A dedicated workspace in Bengaluru designed for deep work and serendipitous collaboration. Built for builders, not for show.
When you're ready, Median can lead or co-lead your pre-seed or seed round with $1M–$10M in capital. No pitch deck required — we already know you and your work.