Aakash Jain

Aakash Jain is an Investment Principal and Associate Partner at VU Venture Partners, a multi-stage global venture capital fund headquartered in San Francisco and Hong Kong. He joined VU Venture Partners in September 2018 and focuses on backing founders who simplify processes and address real market needs at scale. Before entering venture capital, Aakash spent nearly a decade at Morgan Stanley (2005-2013), where he progressed from an engineer in bond pricing and fixed income technology to a quantitative analyst developing algorithms for automated interest rate derivatives trading, and ultimately to Vice President of Interest Rate Derivatives. This deep quantitative finance background gives him a distinctive lens when evaluating technical and fintech startups.

After Morgan Stanley, Aakash earned his MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business (Class of 2015), where he developed a passion for the startup ecosystem. During his MBA, he interned as a Venture Capital Fellow at Jump Capital in 2014. Following graduation, he worked in fintech investment banking at Financial Technology Partners (FT Partners) from 2015 to 2017, advising fintech companies on strategic transactions. He also holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from Cornell University and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Jacobs University Bremen in Germany, where he was a member of the founding class. He completed an International Baccalaureate at Frankfurt International School.

Beyond his role at VU Venture Partners, Aakash co-founded the Chicago Booth Angel Network's Silicon Valley chapter and serves on its diligence committee. He is deeply involved in the startup ecosystem both operationally and as an advisor to several seed- and growth-stage startups, predominantly in fintech and consumer verticals. He has spoken at the University of Chicago's Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation on topics such as breaking into venture capital, and has appeared on the neonVest podcast discussing why a sector-agnostic investment strategy wins.

Aakash invests across VU Venture Partners' seven core verticals -- Consumer, Enterprise, FinTech, Frontier/DeepTech, Healthcare, PropTech, and Web3 -- from Pre-Seed through Series B. He favors founders who aim to simplify complex processes and address genuine market needs at scale. VU Venture Partners targets companies with $10B+ Serviceable Addressable Markets (SAMs) and seeks return potential of 25x to 100x+ inclusive of dilution from future financing rounds before exit.

His personal expertise and deal-flow lean toward fintech and consumer verticals, informed by his years in quantitative trading and fintech investment banking. He has advocated for a sector-agnostic approach, believing that strong founders and large market opportunities matter more than rigid sector mandates. VU Venture Partners' three founding partners collectively bring over 45 years of venture capital experience and have been among the earliest investors in over 20 unicorn startups, including Uber, Facebook, Venmo, Beyond Meat, Palantir, and Wish.