Schema Ventures, a venture capital firm founded by Aarthi Ramamurthy, has unveiled its debut fund to back early-stage startups.
The US-based VC firm's maiden fund will have a target corpus of $20 million, according to a social media post by Ramamurthy, a former engineer at big US tech firms such as Meta Platforms and Microsoft. She will be the sole general partner (GP) at the fund.
Ramamurthy announced the launch of the VC fund at a women's summit organized by Fortune Magazine in Riyadh. In a LinkedIn post, she wrote that the fund will back “exceptional outsiders” who lack “pedigree or proximity”.
“Schema backs exceptional outsiders: early-stage founders building from lived experience, not from pedigree or proximity,” she said.
“Sometimes there’s no pitch deck yet, no co-founder, no capital — just conviction and technical insight. That’s where we come in,” she added.
The Chennai-born entrepreneur said the fund will focus on investing in startups working in the following areas: industrial software, including robots and intelligence for factories, construction, and logistics, workflow intelligence, and developer tools and infrastructure. It wasn’t clear whether the fund will back startups in India.
Schema counts Gokul Rajaram, Elad Gil, Garry Tan, Marc Andreessen, Leo Polovets, Charlie Songhurst, Lachy Groom, Josh Buckley and Y-Combinator’s fund-of-funds as its limited partners.
Ramamurthy is a former Silicon Valley engineer who worked for tech giants Meta, Netflix, and Microsoft. She is also the co-founder of a lingerie startup called True & Co, and runs a podcast show with her husband and former Andreesen Horowitz general partner Sriram Krishnan. Ramamurthy has also invested as a private investor in 30 startups, as per her LinkedIn profile.
