Uncorrelated Ventures

About

Uncorrelated Ventures is a solo-GP venture capital firm founded in 2020 by Salil Deshpande, with initial backing from Bain Capital ¹. The firm is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with an additional office in London ². Deshpande is the second-largest solo GP in the world by AUM, behind Oren Zeev ³.

The firm manages approximately $750 million across three active funds and has invested in more than 190 companies ^{3 4}. Bain Capital invested $76 million across the firm’s first two funds ³. In January 2024, Uncorrelated raised $315 million for its third fund, with Deshpande stating he had “no difficulty” securing capital despite challenging market conditions ⁵.

Uncorrelated operates with zero employees — no junior investors, associates, principals, or administrative staff ³. Deshpande allocates approximately 30% of his time to LP management and 70% to founder and portfolio engagement ³. He maintains relationships with 300 limited partners, with a greater than 75% conversion rate from approximately 100 institutional LP conversations ³.

The firm won both Emerging Performance of the Year: Venture Capital and Performance of the Year: Venture Capital under $500 million at the Private Equity Wire US Awards 2025 ⁴.

Stated Thesis

Uncorrelated Ventures publicly describes itself as “Nerds who invest in infrastructure software” ⁶. The firm states its focus is on early-stage infrastructure software, open source, developer tools, and AI/cloud foundations, as well as decentralized finance ⁷.

For Fund III ($315M, 2024), the firm stated it would allocate roughly 80% of the fund to early-stage investments in traditional infrastructure software and 20% to backing similar startups in the crypto industry ⁵.

Deshpande has emphasized that he does not view open source as a separate investment category. At the Open Core Summit in 2020, he stated: “I never thought of open source as a category, I never thought I’m an open source investor, and I had absolutely no prejudice when looking at a software company about whether it is or isn’t open source or open core or should or should not be. At the end, customers will happily pay for value, and you just have to figure out how to get that value in their hands.” ⁸

On crypto valuations, Deshpande has stated: “It’s real technology with real use cases. I think the use cases were in the past overhyped and overvalued, and it’s our job as investors to properly value them.” ⁵

Inferred Thesis

Based on 23 verified investments in the portfolio table below, the firm’s actual investment behavior reveals the following patterns. Note that these represent a small subset of the firm’s 190+ total investments, so percentages should be considered directional rather than definitive.

Sector distribution: Infrastructure software, databases, and developer tools dominate the portfolio. Of 23 verified investments: 10 are infrastructure software, databases, or developer tools (43%); 7 are DeFi/crypto protocols (30%); 3 are fintech or supply chain (13%); and 3 span other categories including AI infrastructure, defense, and data (13%). The math: 10/23 infra = 43%, 7/23 DeFi = 30%, 3/23 fintech = 13%, 3/23 other = 13%. The crypto overrepresentation likely reflects the availability of crypto funding data versus traditional software; broader sources suggest infrastructure software comprises a larger share of the full 190+ company portfolio.

Stage distribution: According to Tracxn, the firm has made 41 investments at seed stage (average round size $5.08M) and 43 at Series A ⁴. The portfolio skews toward seed and early Series A, consistent with the stated thesis.

Geographic focus: The portfolio is predominantly US-based, with Tracxn reporting 82 investments in the United States and 7 in India ⁴. The firm’s address in San Francisco and the technical infrastructure focus align with a Silicon Valley-centric portfolio.

Check size and approach: Rather than taking large concentrated positions, Deshpande invests smaller initial checks (typically $1M-$2M) in a high volume of companies, building positions over 3-4 rounds to $10-20M invested at a blended $100-150M entry cost ³. This approach has delivered 40-60x returns at $10B+ outcomes ³.

Co-investor patterns: The firm regularly co-invests with Accel, Benchmark, Bessemer, Greylock, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, Mayfield, Bain Capital Ventures, and others ³. The solo-GP structure means Uncorrelated does not compete with larger funds for board seats or ownership.

Notable gaps: Despite describing the thesis as infrastructure-focused, the portfolio includes outliers like Philz Coffee (consumer retail), Astranis (satellite communications), Stashfin (Indian neobanking), and multiple DeFi protocols — suggesting a broader aperture than the stated thesis implies.

Performance: Career track record of approximately 6x TVPI with IRRs around 35% ³. Fund I returned 5.2x gross; Fund II is tracking at 3x with years remaining ³.

Portfolio

This table represents a subset of Uncorrelated Ventures’ 190+ investments. Many early investments were made during Deshpande’s tenure at Bay Partners and Bain Capital Ventures and are included here because they form the track record that defines the firm’s approach.

Notable earlier investments (Bay Partners/Bain Capital Ventures era): MuleSoft (acquired by Salesforce for $6.5B), Buddy Media (acquired by Salesforce), SpringSource (acquired by VMware for $420M), Dropcam (acquired by Google/Nest), Redis (IPO 2024), Dynatrace, DataStax, Lending Club, Sysdig, Hazelcast, Tealium, Sonatype, Gradle, Quantum Metric, Astranis, Compound Finance, MakerDAO, Cosmos, Crusoe Energy, Pipe, dYdX, PostHog, ZeroHash ^{3 7 21}.

Unicorns: The portfolio includes 17 unicorns, including PostHog, ZeroHash, and Framer ⁴.

Note: This table represents approximately 12% of the firm’s 190+ known investments ⁴. Deshpande’s full track record spans 100+ companies across his 20-year venture career ⁷.

In Their Own Words

“I never thought of open source as a category, I never thought I’m an open source investor, and I had absolutely no prejudice when looking at a software company about whether it is or isn’t open source or open core or should or should not be. At the end, customers will happily pay for value, and you just have to figure out how to get that value in their hands.” — Salil Deshpande, Open Core Summit 2020 keynote ⁸

“It’s not something exotic or special or unusual now, for a company to be open source or open core company. It’s just an infrastructure software company. … We just call it a software company.” — Salil Deshpande, Open Core Summit 2020 keynote ⁸

“It’s real technology with real use cases. I think the use cases were in the past overhyped and overvalued, and it’s our job as investors to properly value them.” — Salil Deshpande, on crypto valuations, Bloomberg/ICOHolder, January 2024 ⁵

“Most graph databases today are not truly distributed: they run fine on a couple of nodes but rely on a variety of architectural hacks to run on larger numbers of nodes, and thus aren’t truly scalable.” — Salil Deshpande, Dgraph seed round announcement, July 2022 ¹⁴

“Everyone in AI wants to see healthy competition in the GPU market to accelerate innovation. But in order for that to happen, someone has to develop CUDA-like software for a wide range of GPUs and other processors, which is difficult; it’s why I was excited to invest in Lemurian Labs.” — Salil Deshpande, Lemurian Labs Series A announcement, December 2025 ²⁰

What Founders Say

No independently sourced founder testimonials found. The firm’s solo-GP structure means Deshpande dedicates 70% of his time to founders and portfolio companies ³, but specific founder quotes about their experience working with Uncorrelated Ventures could not be independently verified from public sources.

Sources