Ankur Shrivastava

Most first-time fund managers chase speed.

Ankur Shrivastava chased alignment.

He launched Momentum Capital in 2022 and then did the thing almost nobody in venture does. He slowed down. For the first two and a half years, he made six investments. He took the time to figure out where he was going before he asked anyone, including himself, to move faster.

What he was looking for was alignment. Between his portfolio and his thesis. Between his LPs and the sector he was about to commit to. Between his personal story and the work he was about to spend the next decade doing.

He found it in climate tech, in founders building globally with an India lens, and in a cross-border firm with three people in three countries. Then he stepped on the gas.

In the last 15 months, Momentum Capital has made more than one investment per month. The fund now has 23 portfolio companies, a sharpened climate tech thesis, a Stanford-trained Principal who came in to build it with him, and Fund I almost fully deployed.

This is the story of how he got here, and how VC Lab and Decile Hub gave him the operating stack to build a firm the way modern fund managers actually want to.

The Firm

Momentum Capital is a cross-border venture firm investing in climate tech startups at pre-seed and seed, across energy, industrial, and resource transition. With a presence in Canada, India, and the US, the firm backs founders building technologies that can scale across the Global South.

The thesis is built on three core beliefs, formed through four years of close observation and analysis.

First, climate action is now driven by security, resilience, and competitiveness concerns, not by sustainability alone. Second, the climate challenge will only be solved by transition technologies that can scale across the Global South. And third, India is the world's most important proving ground for Global South scale.

In Ankur's own words: "We have strong affinity for founders driven by deep purpose, and we back teams tackling hard problems with lots of ambition. Our mission is to be an early and long-term partner for startups trying to solve the climate crisis at a global scale."

Engineer, Consultant, Founder, Investor

Ankur's path looks linear from the outside and feels anything but on the inside.

He grew up in an Asian family that defaulted to engineering. His father was an engineer. His mother was a chemistry lecturer. His sister was an engineer. So he followed the script: mechanical engineering undergrad in India, then a master's, then nine years in management consulting, including at BCG.

Consulting fit him because he was a generalist. He could parachute into a problem, find the pattern, and move on. The problem was that nine years of that pace pushed him into work-life-balance burnout.

So he did what a lot of people in his position think about and don't actually do.

He left.

He started Globevestor, framed in his own words as "a grand idea to get work-life balance." That part didn't work out. Building a company never does fix work-life balance.

What Globevestor did do was give him a real classroom. It started as an angel investment platform bridging India and the US, then evolved into cross-border syndicates and nano-VC funds. He got backing from the likes of Tim Draper, Bill Draper, and Boost VC. Over eight years, he wrote 75+ checks across 40+ startups.

He learned how to spot founders. He learned how to lose money. He learned how to make it back. It was a graduate-level education in venture, paid for in tuition only an operator can stomach.

The Lessons That Built Momentum

The lessons from Globevestor became the operating manual for Momentum:

• Founder fatigue is underestimated. Personal financial runway gets ignored until it's too late.
• "Friends make the best teams" is wrong. Relationships break under business pressure. Investing in friends is risky when you're handling other people's money.
• Without a story or mission you're personally invested in, the energy fizzles in down cycles.
• Communication discipline matters from day one. Early at Globevestor, his was, in his own assessment, weak. He carried that lesson directly into Momentum.

Every one of those lessons is now baked into how Momentum picks founders, builds its team, and communicates with LPs.

The Measured Start

When Ankur launched Momentum Capital in 2022, Globevestor proceeds gave him runway. He had no reason to follow the standard fund-one template just because that's how it was done.

So he didn't.

The first two and a half years of Momentum produced six investments. Two in health. Four in climate. The portfolio was small on purpose. It was a signal to himself, and to the LPs paying attention, of where the fund was actually heading.

In his own words: "Once I find the direction, I can get to the speed."

Most fund managers do it the other way around. They get to speed, then try to find direction. By then the portfolio is already telling a story the fund manager didn't choose.

The Climate Migrant

The thesis isn't only intellectual. It's personal.

Four years ago, Ankur moved his family from India to Canada. The reason wasn't career. It was his kid.

His child had a health allergy issue, and his and his wife's breathing were being affected by Delhi air pollution. They left.

He calls himself a climate migrant. The phrase isn't a marketing line. It's a description of why his family lives where it lives.

His wife runs a startup that's now near-unicorn status in India. The cross-border family mirrors the cross-border firm. Three countries. Three people on the team. Every video call has a different city in the background.

A couple of his earlier climate investments did well after three or four choppy years. They gave him more satisfaction than other wins, like in fintech. Combined with his family's experience, the pattern became impossible to ignore.

In his words: "If we want to bring change, we have to lead the change."

He sees Momentum's job as being the bridge. Between climate innovators and capital allocators. Between North American and Indian founders and markets. Between the idea that climate investing is impact and the proof that climate investing actually makes money.

Stepping on the Gas

Once the thesis was clear, a Stanford-trained Principal came in to build it out with him. Together, they sharpened the climate tech focus into specific subsectors, founder profiles, geographies, and check sizes.

That's when the pace shifted.

Over the last 15 months, Momentum has made more than one investment a month. Twenty-three portfolio companies in total. Same fund. Different velocity. Same operator. Now with a sharp thesis to deploy against aggressively.

The Track Record

Earlier Globevestor investments include Agnikul, Snapmint, Chakr Innovation, Springboard, GHC, Wealthy, Oorjan, and Zoomcar.

Across his investing career, the aggregate portfolio valuation exceeds $2B as of end 2025, with over $500M raised in follow-on rounds from firms including Sequoia, Accel, Khosla, Menlo, and Insight. He remains invested in Agnikul, India's leading launch rocket startup, with a nearly 40x unrealized return.

Even though Momentum has a young portfolio with an average holding period of 12 months, more than a third of its companies have already raised follow-on rounds, and early portfolio marks are running ahead of expectations.

Why VC Lab

Momentum's setup is non-template by design. Three people. Three countries. Deployments in both India and North America. A two-and-a-half-year intentional measured start followed by an 18-month sprint.

That kind of firm doesn't fit cleanly inside the standard fund-one playbook. It needed a platform built for the way modern fund managers actually want to operate.

VC Lab was the fit.

• The PACT structure gave Momentum a fundraising framework aligned with LPs who valued mission as much as math.
• Decile Hub gave the firm an agentic back office that doesn't care where the team sits.
• Agentic fund administration removed the headcount overhead a three-person distributed team can't carry.
• Fundraising sprints kept the LP pipeline moving without burning the GPs out.

When Ankur eventually sharpened the fund's focus toward climate tech, none of his LPs asked to be dropped. He had brought them along with monthly updates early, then quarterly once execution kicked in. They saw the pivot coming because he communicated through it like a partner, not a salesperson.

That's the kind of LP relationship the VC Lab and Decile Hub stack is built to support.

What Comes Next

Fund II is on Ankur's mind, at a much larger scale, with continued deployment into climate tech.

The door is open to climate tech founders building for global adoption and scale. Pre-seed and seed. Mission-driven. Hard problems. Big ambition.

If that's you, Ankur and Momentum are easy to find.

Ready to launch your own fund?

VC Lab is the free 14-week accelerator that helps emerging fund managers go from 0 to 1 and launch a real, deployed Fund I. Over 900 VC funds worldwide have launched through the VC Lab playbook, and $1.5B+ in LP commitments have flowed to alumni.

Applications for Cohort 22 are open now.

Apply to VC Lab →

Or explore upcoming events and learn how the program works: govclab.com/events