Anshu Sharma
Co-Founder & CEO, Skyflow (former Venture Partner, Storm Ventures) at skyflow
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Background
Anshu Sharma is co-founder and CEO of Skyflow, a data privacy vault company he founded in January 2019 with fellow Salesforce alum Prakash Khot and engineer Roshmik Saha 12. Before Skyflow, Sharma spent more than five years at Salesforce as Vice President of Products for the Salesforce Platform, where he led the company’s push into Java platform-as-a-service, identity management, database-as-a-service, and next-generation marketing tooling 3. Earlier in his career he worked at Oracle, and he holds a degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur 4.
Between his Salesforce and Skyflow chapters, Sharma served as Venture Partner (and later Managing Venture Partner / Entrepreneur-in-Residence) at Storm Ventures, an enterprise SaaS-focused firm, where he helped launch the Storm India SaaS Fund alongside partners Sanjay Subhedar and Arun Penmetsa 5. He has also been an active angel investor and syndicate lead since 2011, with public references to 50-plus (and by some counts 75+) personal angel investments 16.
Sharma has been a Forbes Technology Council contributor writing on data privacy, and speaks frequently at industry conferences including Databricks’ Data + AI Summit 78.
Stated Thesis
Sharma’s public writing and interviews focus almost entirely on enterprise infrastructure — cloud, data, privacy, and AI. In his own framing on Insight Partners’ podcast, the arc runs from data platforms to trust:
“We need to have a trust layer. And that trust layer needs to work for the data platforms, for the AI platforms, and the Agents and the applications we’re building.” 9
He is publicly bearish on companies trying to train their own frontier models, and bullish on SaaS-delivered AI:
“The idea that you’re going to build your own models on your own GPU clusters is probably true for five to 10 companies in the world.” 9
“The future of SaaS is SaaS. The future of AI is also SaaS.” 9
On his angel activity, his AngelList syndicate describes his focus as “early-stage SaaS and cloud enterprises,” citing seed rounds in Nutanix, CloudVolumes (acquired by VMware), and PubNub as anchor references 6.
Inferred Thesis
Sample size for verified personal angel checks is small (see Portfolio below — roughly a dozen companies with named public confirmation, against self-reported totals of 50-75+). Percentages would be misleading, so the pattern is described qualitatively.
- Sector: Enterprise infrastructure dominates — hyperconverged infrastructure (Nutanix), search/dev infra (Algolia), integration and iPaaS (Workato), messaging infrastructure (PubNub), CRM (Copper/ProsperWorks), fintech infrastructure (Razorpay), legal tech (Logikcull, Fyle), automotive vertical SaaS (Tekion). Consumer or hardware bets are essentially absent from the verified list 61011.
- Stage: Predominantly seed and Series A. His syndicate explicitly names “seed rounds for Nutanix… CloudVolumes… PubNub (Series B)” as the fingerprint, and both Foundersuite and secondary aggregators describe him as an early-stage / ideation-phase backer 610.
- Geography: US + India cross-border. Multiple India-linked deals (Razorpay, Tekion, and India-founder companies) match his role co-leading the Storm India SaaS Fund 511.
- Access pattern: Warm relationships from Oracle and Salesforce years — his own account of the Nutanix seed describes being introduced via a former Oracle colleague and backing CEO Dheeraj Pandey based on prior working knowledge, not cold sourcing 12.
- Notable gap vs. stated thesis: His public writing is now heavily AI-focused, but the verified angel portfolio predates the current AI wave. Whether he is actively cutting new AI-native seed checks (vs. focusing on Skyflow) is not clear from public records.
Portfolio
Personal angel investments only — Skyflow-as-operating-company rounds and Storm Ventures fund deals are excluded except where Sharma is named as a personal check-writer.
| Company | Year | Stage | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nutanix | ~2011 (founding year) | Seed | AngelList syndicate; Sharma’s own blog post recounting his Day-Zero investment 612 |
| CloudVolumes (fka SnapVolumes; acq. by VMware) | ~2011 (founding year) | Seed | AngelList syndicate 6 |
| PubNub | ~2013 | Series A/B (advisor + investor) | AngelList syndicate; secondary confirmation via Crunchbase profile listings 613 |
| Algolia | 2014 | Seed | Secondary aggregator references citing seed-era involvement 11 |
| Workato | 2015 | Early stage (investor & advisor) | Secondary aggregator references 11 |
| Tekion | 2015 | Early stage (investor & advisor) | Secondary aggregator references 11 |
| Logikcull | 2015 | Early stage | Aggregator profiles list Logikcull as his first startup investment in 2015 10 |
| ProsperWorks / Copper | ~2016 | Board Observer + investor | Aggregator profiles 10 |
| Razorpay | 2016 | Seed | Secondary aggregator references 11 |
| ~unknown | Fyle | (year not verified) | Early stage |
| ~unknown | Retention.ai | (year not verified) | Early stage |
| ~unknown | Proven | (year not verified) | Early stage |
This table represents a fraction of Sharma’s self-reported 50-75+ angel checks. Many older AngelList syndicate deals and Storm-era Venture Partner deals are not independently confirmable from public press.
In Their Own Words
On his Nutanix bet (from a 2016 post on his personal blog):
“always be closest to the smartest people you know.” — Anshu Sharma, describing his rule for angel investing after backing Nutanix at seed 12
On why Skyflow existed as an idea for a decade before he built it:
“I’m an ideas person, maybe even a little bit ADD if you follow my Twitter account. But this is one of those ideas that just like stuck around in my head for over 10 years.” 2
On product-market fit for a category-creating product:
“Some categories of products, you can’t sort of incrementally test and build them. You have to build enough that you can now say, hey, if you had this thing, would it change something fundamental about your business or architecture or problem space.” 2
“We actually talked to zero customers from the day we started the company to the day we actually had a beta product that somebody could actually buy.” 2
On what he looks for in founders (one-word answer when asked on the SaaS Club podcast):
“Insight.” 2
On operator-founder resilience:
“How you react to that customer in those moments defines you in the eyes of the customer, but also defines you in the eyes of your own team, defines you in the eyes of your investors.” 2
On enterprise AI adoption (Insight Partners interview):
“Helping enterprises adopt AI without adding more risk to their workflows and data.” 9
“The idea that you’re going to build your own models on your own GPU clusters is probably true for five to 10 companies in the world.” 9
On India timing (Storm Ventures India SaaS Fund launch, 2016):
“India is now where China was five to seven years ago. There will emerge a whole set of new application companies to support the new e-commerce and payment ecosystem, so we think it’s great timing.” 5
What Founders Say
No independently sourced founder testimonials about Sharma-as-angel-investor were found in public press. Portfolio founders (e.g., Nutanix’s Dheeraj Pandey, Razorpay’s founders) have public presences but their statements about Sharma specifically are not surfacing in searchable sources.
Sources
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Skyflow, “Company” page, accessed July 2026. https://www.skyflow.com/company↩↩
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SaaS Club Podcast Ep. 363, “He Waited 10 Years to Launch — Then Grew 400% Year-Over-Year” (Anshu Sharma interview), accessed July 2026. https://saasclub.io/podcast/skyflow-anshu-sharma-363/↩↩↩↩↩↩
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Indiaspora, “Anshu Sharma” member profile, accessed July 2026. https://indiaspora.org/members/anshu-sharma/↩
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LinkedIn profile summary for Anshu Sharma (toanshu), accessed July 2026. https://www.linkedin.com/in/toanshu↩
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TechCrunch, “Storm Ventures Launches $10M Fund For Indian SaaS Startups,” January 19, 2016, accessed July 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/19/storm-ventures-india/↩↩↩
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AngelList, “Invest with Anshu Sharma’s Syndicate,” accessed July 2026. https://venture.angellist.com/anshu-sharma-gmail-com/syndicate↩↩↩↩↩↩↩
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Forbes Technology Council contributor profile for Anshu Sharma, accessed July 2026. https://councils.forbes.com/profile/Anshu-Sharma-Co-Founder-CEO-Skyflow/cf2174fc-1710-495a-aa95-900005b6800f↩
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Databricks Data + AI Summit 2024 speaker page, Anshu Sharma, accessed July 2026. https://www.databricks.com/dataaisummit/speaker/anshu-sharma↩
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Insight Partners, “How Skyflow is building the trust layer for Agents,” accessed July 2026. https://www.insightpartners.com/ideas/skyflow-leadership/↩↩↩↩↩
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EasyVC, “Anshu Sharma — Startup Investor Profile,” accessed July 2026. https://easyvc.ai/investor/anshu-sharma/↩↩↩↩
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Foundersuite, “Anshu Sharma investor profile,” accessed July 2026. https://foundersuite.com/investors/anshu-sharma↩↩↩↩↩↩
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Anshu Sharma personal blog, “Riding with Nutanix from Day Zero — The Stack Fallacy,” September 2016, accessed July 2026. https://anshublog.com/2016/09/riding-with-nutanix-from-day-zero.html↩↩↩
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Crunchbase person profile for Anshu Sharma (co-founder & CEO, Skyflow), accessed July 2026. https://www.crunchbase.com/person/anshu-sharma↩