Rohati Capital (“Rohati”), a global venture platform built by former Amazon operators, today announced the oversubscribed close of its inaugural fund, Rohati Fund I (“the Fund”), at $50 million against a $30 million target. The Fund drew a distinctive base of limited partners: 17 Amazon executives and alumni, 27 professional venture and private equity investors, 20 founders and CEOs, and eight CIOs, across 16 countries.
Rohati’s partners came together at Amazon, where they built and led the business behind Amazon Lending. Launched in 2014, the business used machine learning to underwrite marketplace sellers whose conventional credit scoring was passed over, extending more than $1.5 billion in credit across the US, UK, India and Japan within two years of launch and creating a category in the process. The team that built it is data-oriented by nature and design, trained to find the opportunity others miss and then build the access needed to act on it. Years later, they saw a version of the same problem in venture.
Venture’s strongest returns concentrate among a small group of top-tier managers who are hard to identify, harder to access and not in market in every vintage. Institutional allocators often spend decades and staff entire teams to earn access to those managers. Individual investors and family offices have had just two options, each with a tradeoff. A direct venture fund delivers the alpha and the path to distributions, but ties an investor to one manager, one vintage and one strategy. A fund-of-funds buys diversification but adds an extra layer of fees and a longer path to DPI, diluting the power law that drives venture returns.
Rohati was built to give those investors a better option. The Fund invests roughly half of its capital in a concentrated set of venture funds and pairs those holdings with direct positions in companies, building diversification across vintage, geography and strategy while offering the economics and the path to distributions of a direct fund. The direct positions come from the managers Rohati backs, so the portfolio is built from the best ideas of some of the world’s top managers rather than a single firm’s pipeline. The model is designed to beat a single venture fund, not to average out across many.
“We saw the same pattern in venture that we saw at Amazon: a category that works, but best at the very top, and mostly for people who already have a way in,” said Nick Talwar, Managing Partner of Rohati Capital. “We built Rohati so individual investors can get the economics and the path to distributions of a direct fund, with diversification across vintage, geography and strategy, assembled from the best ideas of managers we have worked alongside for years.”
The team
- Nick Talwar, Managing Partner, launched and ran Amazon Lending. Before Amazon, he ran Visa’s North American credit card business, which accounted for roughly a quarter of the company’s revenue. He went on to serve as Uber’s division executive for vehicle supply worldwide, spanning financing, rentals and fleet management, and as chief executive of the company’s US leasing business, and he was later CEO of CircleUp. He has served on the boards of Rapido and PayJoy, both multi-time unicorns, from an early stage through their growth. He holds degrees from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service (where he sits on the board) and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
- Jason MacRae, Investing Partner, was director of research science at Amazon, where he built the models behind Amazon Lending and succeeded Talwar as general manager of the business. He later served as chief data officer at Capital Group. He holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvard University.
- Steven Himmel, Investing Partner, was a senior managing director at HighPost Capital, a Bezos family-anchored, consumer-focused private equity firm, and earlier a partner at Vanterra Capital. He began his career at Credit Suisse and holds a degree from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.
- K.V. Dhillon, Business Development Partner, has spent nearly three decades raising capital and building investor relationships across the United States and Asia. He was a managing director at Crescent Cove Advisors, led Guggenheim Capital Management’s Asia business, and was a partner at Thomas Weisel Partners. He holds degrees from the University of Calgary and Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
- Charles Elkan, Investing Partner, was the first Amazon Fellow and head of the company’s core machine learning team, and later global head of machine learning at Goldman Sachs. He is a professor of computer science at UC San Diego, and he was educated at the University of Cambridge and Cornell University.
- Alen Rakipovic, Technical Advisor and Partner, built large-scale AI systems at Amazon and then AI infrastructure and advertising models at Meta. He is a principal engineer at Stripe and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Zagreb.
That operating history is also how Rohati gets access. Its positions come from relationships the partners built as operators and board members, not from a cold introduction to a manager in market.
Rohati’s portfolio includes early direct investments in SpaceX, along with fund positions in Union Square Ventures and Gradient Ventures.
“Nick has been an extraordinary mentor to me over eight years of PayJoy’s history,” said Doug Ricket, CEO of PayJoy. “I still don’t know what he saw in us in those early days, but his counsel through a 500-fold increase in revenue gave me perspective and encouragement, and helped me become the leader I wanted to be. Nick sees the potential in the businesses and people he mentors—he has always pushed me to think big and never to be afraid to speak boldly about my ambitions to change the world.”
“At Gradient, we work closely with AI founders on the technical, product, and scaling challenges of building enduring companies,” said Darian Shirazi, General Partner at Gradient Ventures. “Limited partners with deep industry experience make that work stronger. The Rohati team’s experience building and applying machine learning at Amazon gives our founders access to a rare operator’s perspective—and gives Gradient a distinctive advantage as we help the next generation of AI companies grow.”
Most of Rohati’s exposure sits in the US, with top-tier Bay Area managers and the AI cluster, where the largest share of the opportunity still concentrates. Outside the US, the firm invests fund-first through local specialists, with India its largest international market. The bar abroad is higher by design: internationally, Rohati backs only true category-definers.
About Rohati
Rohati Capital is an operator-led, global venture platform founded by former Amazon builders. The firm invests in a curated set of early, specialist venture managers across geographies, strategies and vintages, then invests directly alongside them in the best companies they source. The firm is based in Palo Alto, California. Learn more at rohati.capital.
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