Ishani Thakur

Background

Ishani Thakur is a Partner at Hanabi Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm she co-founded with Mike Volpi and Bryan Offutt after all three departed Index Ventures ¹². The firm was launched in 2025 and is based in Palo Alto ³.

Before venture capital, Thakur had a career spanning AI research and software engineering. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from MIT ¹. She conducted robotics and reinforcement learning research at DeepMind and MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), focusing on methods to train autonomous agents ¹⁴. She also held engineering roles at Confluent, Lyft Level 5 (the autonomous vehicle division), and Google ¹.

Thakur joined Index Ventures as a Partner in 2023, where she invested in enterprise software with a focus on ML, data, and infrastructure ⁴. She was previously at Index Ventures before co-founding Hanabi Capital with Volpi and Offutt ².

Thakur has served as a guest author at TechCrunch and participated in the 2024 Startup Battlefield programming at TechCrunch Disrupt ⁵⁶.

Stated Thesis

Hanabi Capital’s website describes Thakur as investing in “companies enabling the next frontier in technology” and “working with people who are mission obsessed” ¹. The firm invests primarily in artificial intelligence and software infrastructure ³.

At Index Ventures, Thakur publicly described her focus as enterprise software, “with a specific passion for ML, data, and infrastructure,” and stated she is “especially interested in technologies and products that afford teams new levels of abstraction and enable autonomy” ⁴.

Inferred Thesis

Based on 7 verified investments associated with Hanabi Capital (where Thakur is one of three partners), the following patterns emerge. Note: PitchBook reports Hanabi Capital Management has made approximately 20 investments total ³, so these 7 represent roughly 35% of the known portfolio.

Sector Allocation (computed from 7 verified portfolio entries)

• AI / ML: 3 companies (43%) – Cognition AI, Traversal, ArchiBoost AI ⁷⁸³
• Infrastructure / Developer Tools: 3 companies (43%) – LiveKit, Applied Compute, Ollama ⁹¹⁰²
• Drones / Robotics: 1 company (14%) – BRINC Drones ¹¹

Note: With only 7 of approximately 20 investments verified, the actual distribution may differ. The sample is too small for reliable percentage-based analysis.

Stage Distribution

The verified investments span seed through Series C. LiveKit was a Series B ⁹, Cognition AI raised over $400M (growth stage) ⁷, BRINC Drones was a $75M Series B ¹¹, and Applied Compute was a Series A ¹⁰. Traversal was a seed round ⁸. This suggests the firm invests across early to growth stages.

Geographic Concentration

Verified portfolio companies are primarily based in the United States, consistent with Hanabi’s Palo Alto headquarters.

Co-investor Patterns

Based on verified deals, frequent co-investors include Founders Fund (Cognition AI, Netic), Sequoia (Traversal), Kleiner Perkins (Traversal), and Index Ventures (LiveKit) ⁷⁸⁹.

Portfolio

This table represents approximately 35% of Hanabi Capital’s reported 20 investments. Additional portfolio companies associated with Hanabi partners from their Index Ventures tenure (such as Scale AI, ClickHouse, Confluent, Temporal, Starburst, Lightning AI, Adaptive ML, Superlinked) are board seats or investments made prior to Hanabi’s founding and are not included here.

In Their Own Words

No independently sourced direct quotes from Ishani Thakur were found in interviews, podcasts, or articles beyond the biographical statements on the Hanabi Capital and TechCrunch websites cited above.

What Founders Say

No independently sourced founder testimonials found.

Sources