Apoorva Pandhi

Managing Director at Zetta Venture Partners

Panelist

Apoorva loves the complexity and thrill of the 0 to 1 startup phase and feels fortunate to work with deeply technical and product-centric founders. He finds them tackling the hardest challenges in AI/ML, data infrastructure and cloud-native infra. As a Managing Director at Zetta, he is excited to partner with founders who are ready to push through and beyond the complex chaos of this early stage to unleash greater potential and market impact.

Apoorva's fascination for complex problems is rooted in his love for math and statistics as his mother, a mathematician, always challenged him, pushing him beyond his comfort zone. This led him to explore technology as the next frontier, starting with an engineering degree from IIT Delhi.

Over the years, Apoorva has experienced this frenzied energy, firsthand. He has been in the trenches with early stage engineering-first startups in different modalities. He first met with several engineering-first companies as an investor at Lightspeed Ventures and then Foundation Capital. He has invested in data and ML infra companies like Tabular/OSS Iceberg (acquired by Databricks), Outerbounds/OSS metaflow, Motherduck/OSS DuckDB, Gable AI and Fennel (acquired by Databricks), amongst others. He was also a co-founder of a company in the NLP/ML space and a GTM/sales leader at Quid.

In addition to his undergrad from IIT, Apoorva holds an MBA from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. His happy place is spending time with his daughters, ramping up his knowledge of fantasy football and playing tennis.