We are excited to announce that Venture Highway (VH) is merging with General Catalyst (GC) to lead GC’s initiatives in India and to seek to create one of the most powerful venture platforms to support the next generation of entrepreneurs in India.

This merger unites one of the world’s largest and most respected platforms with a highly reputed Indian seed investment team, reflecting perfect alignment in culture, people, and vision.

VH was co-founded in 2014 by Neeraj Arora, former Chief Business Officer of WhatsApp and a prolific angel investor in Indian startups. Driven by a passion for giving back, Neeraj started VH to nurture India’s entrepreneurial tech talent from their early stages to global success. In 2018, Priya Mohan joined Neeraj after exiting her startup. Together, they quietly and steadily built VH into a well-respected early-stage investment firm in India, writing among the first checks for companies such as Meesho, Moglix, Applied Intuition, BetterPlace, and Chalo.

The first foundational step for any union is the people and their alignment in values. The beginnings of the GC-VH unison go back almost 7 years since Neeraj and Hemant Taneja first met and built a relationship of deep trust and respect, fueled by their shared interest in India, among other things. On the culture front, VH’s belief that its team’s diversity, radical transparency, and shared empathy for each other, offsets any individual blindspots strongly resonates with GC’s own culture of “We” vs “I” philosophy. 

The second foundational part of this event is GC & VH’s common excitement about India, which today in our view is undergoing one of the most transformational growths in its history. GC has a strong history of investing in India, having done its first deal in 2019 and consistently increasing pace hence, backing marquee companies such as Cred, Spinny, Orange Health, and Loop, to name a few. 

As part of GC’s ‘Global Resilience thesis’, it understands that India’s economic, political, and strategic agency in the world is growing; supported by both macro and micro tailwinds. Therefore, to look at India as yet another “investment destination” or “a vast geography” is inadequate by itself. The country’s diverse culture, consumer psychology, and deep structural idiosyncrasies need a level of understanding that numbers often do not do justice to. 

Hence, with India’s agency increasing and the shifting geo-political background, the need for an extremely strong and deep Indo-US collaboration becomes imperative today! VH’s strong and deep access to what we believe is the best talent in India via its focus on India plus the India-US corridor along with GC’s deep connections in the US and Europe, makes the combination extremely well placed to play a significant role in amplifying the Indo-US-Europe collaboration in AI, technology, industry, and talent.

We think two factors happening in parallel make this role an absolute need - a) the drastic changes in China’s global influence and b) India’s own growing indigenous capabilities in areas such as manufacturing, defense buoyed by its favorable policies, the best demographic dividend, massive tech and AI talent (Tortoise’s Global AI index) and its proprietary digital infrastructure. 

Beyond Venture Investing

Both VH and GC believe traditional venture investing is important but insufficient for driving transformative opportunities. VH has been reimagining venture models for India, while GC has shown boldness and entrepreneurial thinking through incubations (Livongo) and creating specific products that demonstrate its ‘platform philosophy’ (GC’s Customer Value strategy). 

The Vision for the Future

GC and VH aim to combine global networks and capital with deep India localization to:

• Reimagine venture investing to suit India’s unique opportunities and challenges.
• Build focused Indo-US collaborations to drive talent and tech synergies.
• Digitize and expand core GDP-driving sectors such as manufacturing.
• Develop industry-specific incubation and partnership strategies to build large enterprises from India for the world.

This merger goes beyond Venture investing, aiming to nurture deep tech talent, foster innovation, and accelerate digitization across industries in India, driven by a shared set of values, culture, and ambitious goals.