Salil Deshpande

Background

Salil Deshpande is the Founder and General Partner of Uncorrelated Ventures, a solo-GP venture firm managing approximately $750 million across three funds ¹. He is the second-largest solo GP in the world by AUM, behind Oren Zeev ¹. He operates the firm with zero employees – no junior investors, associates, principals, or administrative staff ¹.

Deshpande holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University (1989) and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University (1991) ². Before venture capital, he held engineering and operator roles at GE Research, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Sun Microsystems, Enterprise Integration Technologies (EIT), Borland, CustomWare, and The Middleware Company ³.

He entered venture investing as a General Partner at Bay Partners (2006-2013), where he made early investments in MuleSoft and Dynatrace ³. He then joined Bain Capital Ventures as Managing Director (2013-2020), where he invested approximately $150 million into 32 companies over seven years, completing 42 deals – more deals per year than any other partner across PE, VC, or any other business unit in the firm’s history ⁴. Bain Capital itself invested $76 million across his first two funds at Uncorrelated ¹.

He founded Uncorrelated Ventures in 2020 ⁵. Over 20 years as a venture investor, Deshpande has invested in over 100 companies early ². He was on the Forbes Midas List of the 100 best-performing venture investors worldwide in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2022, and 2023, and ranked #79 on the 2024 Midas List ^{6 2}. He appeared on the inaugural Forbes Midas Seed List in 2022 and the Business Insider Seed 100 List in 2021 and 2022 ⁷. Uncorrelated Ventures 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 ⁸.

He testified before the Federal Trade Commission in May 2023 on a panel about cloud computing business practices, raising concerns about how major cloud providers commercialize open-source software ⁹.

Stated Thesis

Deshpande publicly describes his focus as investing in early-stage infrastructure software, open source, developer tools, and AI/cloud foundations, as well as decentralized finance ^{2 5}.

He has stated that he does not view open source as a separate investment category. In a 2020 keynote at the Open Core Summit, he said: “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.” ¹⁰

He also stated at the same event: “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. It may be using the open core or open source tactics as go-to-market, or it may not be.” ¹⁰

Deshpande is a prominent advocate for protecting open-source authors from cloud infrastructure providers. He convened leaders from two dozen open-source companies and engaged open-source lawyer Heather Meeker to draft the Commons Clause in 2018 ¹¹. In a TechCrunch essay, he wrote: “The behavior of cloud infrastructure providers threatens the viability of open source.” He argued that while AWS’s use of open-source projects is “not illegal,” it remains “not conducive to sustainable open-source communities, and especially commercial open-source innovation.” ¹²

Inferred Thesis

Based on 37 verified investments below, Deshpande’s actual portfolio reveals the following patterns:

Sector distribution: Infrastructure software and developer tools dominate the portfolio. Of 37 verified investments: approximately 22 are infrastructure software, databases, or developer tools (59%); 6 are DeFi/crypto protocols (16%); 4 are fintech (11%); and 5 span other categories including consumer, space, and energy (14%). The math: 22/37 infra = 59%, 6/37 DeFi = 16%, 4/37 fintech = 11%, 5/37 other = 14%.

Stage distribution: Deshpande invests primarily at seed and Series A. According to Tracxn, Uncorrelated Ventures has made 41 investments at seed stage (average round size $5.08M) and 43 at Series A (average $15.3M) ⁸. He builds positions over 3-4 rounds at different valuations rather than taking large concentrated bets ¹³.

Investment approach: Rather than fighting for 20% ownership stakes, Deshpande invests smaller initial checks (typically a couple million dollars) in roughly 4x the number of companies, building positions to $10-20M invested at a blended $100-150M entry cost ¹³. This high-volume approach has delivered 40-60x returns at $10B+ outcomes ¹³.

Geographic focus: Based in Palo Alto, the portfolio is predominantly US-based with some international investments (Junglee Games in India, RentoMojo in India, CoinDCX in India, Autify in Japan) ^{7 14}.

Founder profile patterns: Deshpande’s engineering background (Cornell EE, Stanford EE) and operator experience at Sun Microsystems, Borland, and others lead him to invest heavily in companies with deep technical founders building infrastructure-layer products ^{2 3}.

Co-investor patterns: He regularly co-invests with Accel, Benchmark, Bessemer, Greylock, Craft, Andreessen Horowitz, Insight, Lightspeed, Mayfield, Menlo, Bain Capital, GV, Sierra, and Norwest ¹. The solo-GP structure means he does not compete with larger funds for board seats or ownership.

Notable gaps: Despite describing his thesis as infrastructure-focused, the portfolio includes notable outliers like Philz Coffee (consumer retail), Astranis (satellite communications), and multiple DeFi protocols – suggesting a broader aperture than the stated thesis implies ^{2 7}.

Performance: Career track record of approximately 6x TVPI with IRRs around 35% ¹. Fund I returned 5.2x gross; Fund II is tracking at 3x with years remaining ¹. Historical average across his career is 6x gross returns ¹.

Portfolio

This table represents a subset of Deshpande’s 100+ verified investments across Bay Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, and Uncorrelated Ventures.

Note: Many years are approximated based on founding year or period of Deshpande’s tenure at the relevant firm. Only 38 of an estimated 100+ investments could be independently verified with sources.

Exits: MuleSoft (IPO, then acquired by Salesforce for $6.5B), Buddy Media (acquired by Salesforce), SpringSource (acquired by VMware), Dropcam (acquired by Google/Nest), Jambool (acquired by Google), Redis (IPO 2024) ^{3 4 7}.

Unicorns: Uncorrelated Ventures has 17 unicorns in its portfolio, including PostHog, ZeroHash, and Framer ⁸.

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 ¹⁰

“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 ¹⁰

“The behavior of cloud infrastructure providers threatens the viability of open source.” – Salil Deshpande, TechCrunch, November 2018 ¹²

“Containers will address the majority of use cases that heavier virtual machines do today, plus more that virtual machines cannot. What’s needed now is software that natively understands containers, applications running within them, and services built on top of them. Sysdig has all of these capabilities and more.” – Salil Deshpande, Sysdig Series B announcement, April 2016 ¹⁶

“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, 2022 ¹⁸

What Founders Say

No independently sourced founder testimonials found. Deshpande’s solo-GP structure means he dedicates 70% of his time to founders and portfolio companies and 30% to LP management ¹, but specific founder quotes about their experience working with him could not be independently verified from public sources.

Connections

• Board member, Redis ¹⁹
• Board member, Sysdig – joined the board during Series B in 2016 ¹⁶
• Board member, Dgraph Labs ¹⁸
• Board member, Lightbend (fka Typesafe) ⁷
• Board member, Iron.io ⁷
• Board member, Ondat ⁷
• Board member, Arcion ⁷
• Board member, RentoMojo ⁷
• Advisor, Quantum Metric ¹⁷
• Former Managing Director, Bain Capital Ventures (2013-2020) ³
• Former General Partner, Bay Partners (2006-2013) ³
• Speaker, HumanX 2026 – panel “Inside the 2026 AI VC Playbook” alongside Esther Wong (3C AGI Partners), Mark Terbeek (Greycroft), and Gene Teare (Crunchbase) ²⁰
• Speaker, AngelList Confidential 2023 ²¹
• Panelist, FTC Cloud Computing Forum (May 2023) ⁹
• Frequent co-investor with Accel, Benchmark, Bessemer, Greylock, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, and Bain Capital Ventures ¹

Sources