Uncorrelated Ventures

Reviewed Updated Jul 24, 2026

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Location San Francisco, California
Founded 2020
Fund Size $750M+ AUM across three funds; Fund III: $315M (2024)
Website https://uncorrelated.com
Stage Focus
seed series-a
Sector Focus
infrastructure-software open-source developer-tools defi cloud-infrastructure crypto fintech

Team

Salil Deshpande Founder & General Partner

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.

Company Stage Year Sector Status Source
RudderStack Seed 2020 Developer Tools Active 9
Opyn Seed 2020 DeFi Active 10
CoinDCX Series B 2020 Crypto Active 10
AscendEx Series B 2020 Crypto Active 10
AutoCloud Seed 2021 Cloud Infrastructure Active 11
Bodo.ai Series A 2021 Data Infrastructure Active 12
Daloopa Series A 2021 Data/Fintech Active 13
Merkle Science Series A 2021 Crypto/Analytics Active 10
Flux Protocol Seed 2021 DeFi Active 10
Dgraph Seed 2022 Databases Active 14
Netmaker Seed 2022 Networking/Infrastructure Active 15
Slai Seed 2022 AI/ML Infrastructure Active 16
Stashfin Series C 2022 Fintech Active 17
Ember Fund Seed 2022 Crypto Active 10
Hidden Road Series A 2022 Crypto/Fintech Acquired (2025) 10
Pando Series B 2023 Supply Chain/AI Active 18
Fingerprint Series C 2023 Developer Tools Active 19
Archimedes Seed 2023 DeFi Active 10
Terrace Seed 2024 Crypto/Trading Active 10
Defense Unicorns Series B (participated, $136M at $1B+ val; Bain Capital Tech Opportunities led; Ansa Capital, Sapphire Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, AVP, and David H. Petraeus also participated) 2026-01-13 Defense/DevSecOps Active (San Antonio-based; Rob Slaughter CEO; 300% YoY military systems adoption) 4222930
Sedai Follow-on ~2024 Cloud Infrastructure Active 4
Lemurian Labs Series A 2025 AI Infrastructure Active 20
S2.dev Early ($3.85M; Accel led; Grayscale Ventures, Transpose Platform, Race Capital, Pioneer Fund, Ritual Capital, Orange Collective also participated) 2026-02-25 Developer Tools / Data Infrastructure Active ($5.5M total post-YC; ex-Etsy/Meta/Confluent founders) 4262728
Reo.Dev Series A (new investor, $11.3M; Elevation Capital led; returning Heavybit, India Quotient, Foster Ventures) 2026-07-17 AI / Developer GTM / Sales Intelligence Active ($15.3M total; SF-based; Achintya Gupta CEO) 232425

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

  1. “Uncorrelated Ventures Secures $315 Million for New Fund, Blending Focus on Software and Crypto,” ICOHolder, January 2024, accessed April 2026. https://icoholder.com/en/news/uncorrelated-ventures-secures-315-million-for-new-fund-blending-focus-on-software-and-crypto↩

  2. Uncorrelated Ventures investor profile, Infor Capital, accessed April 2026. https://inforcapital.com/companies/uncorrelated-ventures/↩

  3. “The 2nd Largest Solo GP in the World: How (and Why) Salil Deshpande Manages $750M with Zero Employees,” Henry the 9th (Substack), accessed April 2026. https://henrythe9th.substack.com/p/the-solo-gp-model-at-scale-how-and↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩

  4. Uncorrelated Ventures profile, Tracxn, accessed April 2026. https://tracxn.com/d/venture-capital/uncorrelatedventures/__-wlmNm5-nw-7Vif-TLxV08degjVBvO4FuVBN0GD3OB8↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩

  5. “VC Firm Uncorrelated Ventures Raises $315 Million for New Fund,” Bloomberg, January 30, 2024, accessed April 2026. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-30/vc-firm-uncorrelated-ventures-raises-315-million-for-new-fund↩↩↩↩

  6. Uncorrelated Ventures website, accessed April 2026. https://uncorrelated.com/↩

  7. Salil Deshpande profile, VCSheet, accessed April 2026. https://www.vcsheet.com/who/salil-deshpande↩↩↩

  8. “OCS 2020 Keynote: Salil Deshpande,” COSS Community, accessed April 2026. https://www.coss.community/cossc/ocs-2020-keynote-salil-deshpande-58l2↩↩↩

  9. “RudderStack raises $5M seed round for its open-source Segment competitor,” TechCrunch, May 27, 2020, accessed April 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/27/rudderstack-raises-5m-seed-round-for-its-open-source-segment-competitor/↩

  10. Uncorrelated Ventures crypto portfolio, Crypto Fundraising, accessed April 2026. https://crypto-fundraising.info/funds/uncorrelated-ventures/↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩

  11. “AutoCloud raises $4M to commercialize its OSS cloud visualization service,” TechCrunch, November 22, 2021, accessed April 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/22/autocloud-raises-4m-to-commercialize-its-oss-cloud-visualization-service/↩

  12. “Bodo.ai secures $14M, aims to make Python better at handling large-scale data,” TechCrunch, August 25, 2021, accessed April 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/25/bodo-ai-secures-14m-aims-to-make-python-better-at-handling-large-scale-data/↩

  13. “Credit Suisse leads $20M Series A in data extraction startup Daloopa,” TechCrunch, July 15, 2021, accessed April 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/15/credit-suisse-leads-20m-series-a-in-data-extraction-startup-daloopa/↩

  14. “Popular Open Source GraphQL Company Dgraph Secures $6M in Seed Round with New Leadership,” PR Newswire, July 2022, accessed April 2026. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/popular-open-source-graphql-company-dgraph-secures-6m-in-seed-round-with-new-leadership-301589818.html↩↩

  15. “Netmaker connects servers spread across multiple locations with WireGuard,” TechCrunch, October 20, 2022, accessed April 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/20/netmaker-connects-servers-spread-across-multiple-locations-with-wireguard/↩

  16. “Slai makes smart choices,” TechCrunch, May 10, 2022, accessed April 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/10/slai-seed-round/↩

  17. “Neobank Stashfin raises $270 million, tops $700 million valuation,” TechCrunch, June 21, 2022, accessed April 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/21/neobank-stashfin-raises-270-million-tops-700-million-valuation/↩

  18. “AI-powered supply chain startup Pando lands $30M investment,” TechCrunch, May 3, 2023, accessed April 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/03/ai-powered-supply-chain-startup-pando-lands-30m-investment/↩

  19. “With $33M Series C, Fingerprint looks to expand device intelligence platform,” TechCrunch, October 17, 2023, accessed April 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/17/with-33m-in-new-capital-fingerprint-looks-to-expand-device-intelligence-platform/↩

  20. “Lemurian Labs Raises $28 Million Series A to Liberate AI from the Constraints of Hardware,” GlobeNewsWire, December 3, 2025, accessed April 2026. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/12/03/3198947/0/en/Lemurian-Labs-Raises-28-Million-Series-A-to-Liberate-AI-from-the-Constraints-of-Hardware.html↩↩

  21. Salil Deshpande profile, Arete Index, accessed April 2026. https://www.areteindex.com/angels/salil-deshpande/↩

  22. PR Newswire, “Defense Unicorns Raises $136 Million Series B to Build the Software Backbone of the Department of War,” January 2026, accessed April 2026. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/defense-unicorns-raises-136-million-series-b-to-build-the-software-backbone-of-the-department-of-war-302658857.html↩

  23. PR Newswire, “Reo.Dev Raises $11.3 Million Series A to Scale AI Signals for Companies Selling to Engineering Teams,” July 17, 2026. Accessed July 21, 2026. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/reodev-raises-11-3-million-series-a-to-scale-ai-signals-for-companies-selling-to-engineering-teams-302828436.html — Confirms Uncorrelated Ventures as new investor in Reo.Dev’s $11.3M Series A led by Elevation Capital; Heavybit, India Quotient, and Foster Ventures also participated. ↩

  24. YourStory, “Reo.Dev raises $11.3M in Series A led by Elevation Capital,” July 17, 2026. Accessed July 21, 2026. https://yourstory.com/2026/07/reodev-raises-113-million-series-a-elevation-capital — Independent confirmation of Uncorrelated Ventures participation in the Reo.Dev Series A. ↩

  25. “Reo.Dev Bags $11.3M Series A to Scale Across the US,” Yahoo Finance (AccessNewswire syndication), July 2026. Accessed July 24, 2026. https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/reo-dev-bags-11-3m-055000508.html — Third independent primary confirmation of Uncorrelated Ventures as new investor in the $11.3M Series A; Elevation Capital lead; Heavybit, India Quotient, Foster Ventures returning; $15.3M total funding. ↩

  26. “Data infrastructure startup S2.dev raises $3.85 Mn led by Accel,” Entrackr, February 25, 2026. Accessed July 24, 2026. https://entrackr.com/snippets/data-infrastructure-startup-s2dev-raises-385-mn-led-by-accel-1115272 — Confirms Uncorrelated Ventures participated in S2.dev’s Accel-led $3.85M round on February 25, 2026; $5.5M total funding since joining YC Fall 2025 batch. ↩

  27. “S2.dev raises $3.85 million to simplify real-time data updates for apps,” NewsBytes, February 25, 2026. Accessed July 24, 2026. https://www.newsbytesapp.com/news/business/s2dev-raises-385-million-to-simplify-real-time-data-updates-for-apps/tldr — Independent confirmation of Accel-led $3.85M round with Uncorrelated Ventures participating; founders are former engineers from Etsy, Meta, and Confluent. ↩

  28. “S2.dev secures $3.85 million led by Accel,” The Head and Tale, February 25, 2026. Accessed July 24, 2026. https://theheadandtale.com/ai-emerging-tech/s2-dev-secures–3-85-million-led-by-accel/ — Third independent confirmation naming Uncorrelated Ventures alongside Grayscale Ventures, Transpose Platform, Race Capital, Pioneer Fund, Ritual Capital, and Orange Collective; prior $500K YC Fall 2025 Seed noted. ↩

  29. Bain Capital, “Defense Unicorns Raises $136 Million Series B to Build the Software Backbone of the Department of War,” January 13, 2026. Accessed July 24, 2026. https://www.baincapital.com/news/defense-unicorns-raises-136-million-series-b-build-software-backbone-department-war — Primary Bain Capital announcement confirming its Tech Opportunities fund led Defense Unicorns’ $136M Series B at $1B+ valuation on January 13, 2026, with Uncorrelated Ventures, Ansa Capital, Sapphire Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, AVP, and David H. Petraeus participating. ↩

  30. Defense Unicorns press release, “Defense Unicorns Raises $136 Million Series B,” January 13, 2026. Accessed July 24, 2026. https://defenseunicorns.com/defense-unicorns-raises-136-million-series-b/ — Company’s own primary release confirming Uncorrelated Ventures participation in the $136M Series B; Rob Slaughter CEO quote on making software “a strategic deterrent”; 300% YoY military adoption. ↩