Apoorva Pandhi
MANAGING DIRECTOR
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 Outerbounds (OSS metaflow), Electric Sheep, Motherduck (OSS DuckDB), Tabular (OSS Iceberg), and Fennel, amongst others. He was also a co-founder of his own company Funnl Labs, in the NLP/ML space and a GTM/sales leader at an NLP/ML company Quid. At Quid, he helped the company scale from 0 to 1 and find product market fit.
In addition to his undergrad from IIT, Apoorva holds an MBA from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Outside of work, Apoorva is the co-founder of GTMfordev, a forum where early stage technical founders can learn fundamentals around go-to-market design from practitioners and successful founders. Over the past few months, the forum has tackled topics such as finding design partners, unpacking basics of content marketing, community building and understanding buying behavior amongst other topics. His happy place is spending time with his daughter, ramping up his knowledge of fantasy football and playing tennis.
