About

Hey, I’m Pankaj (“PJ” to some). I’m the Managing Partner at Saka Ventures, an early-stage venture fund investing in startups targeting large global markets. If you’d like to pitch us, please consider taking 2-3 minutes to fill out this form.

I was a Partner at 500 Startups for a little more than 4 years. At 500, I was fortunate to meet and invest in some amazing founders in India, Bangladesh, Jordan, Scandinavia, NYC and Silicon Valley. The companies I’ve been invested, like Knotel, Innovaccer, Springboard, ShipRocket, Paperstreet, Whiz.ai and more used to be on AngelList until the restructuring of the product.

I started my career in the financial industry. From 1992 till 2006 I worked at New York financial firms like JPMorgan, Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) and GlobeOp Financial Services. In 2007, I moved to New Delhi to start a business called Teknatus Solutions. At Teknatus we built Semblr and Mojowiz. Semblr was a marketplace to procure and provide domestic services. Mojowiz was a quick and easy way to curate content on the web and share it on Twitter and Facebook – much like Buffer.

I love tech, reading Sci-fi, writing about random things as you can see, watching shoot ’em up-blow ’em up and sci-fi movies. I’ve developed an interest in video creation but that’s been on hold recently.

I was investing in and mentoring Indian startups at TLabs, a Times Group initiative from January 2012 – September 2012.

I founded Startup Weekend in India with a fabulous group of volunteer organizers across the country in 2011 thru 2013.

I am a co-founder of the HeadStart Network Foundation based in Bangalore, India and was the city lead for Startup Saturday Delhi from 2008 until 2010.

You can find me on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) and you can find some of my pictures and IGTV videos on Instagram.

Don’t forget to checkout Invest Stream on YouTube and also check out some of my personal startup and tech related videos on YouTube. You can also check out videos from Blockhack events.