Alok Goyal

Alok Goyal is a Co-Founder and Partner at Stellaris Venture Partners, an early-stage venture capital firm he launched in 2016 alongside Ritesh Banglani and Rahul Chowdhri after the three left Helion Venture Partners. Before venture capital, Goyal spent much of his operating career in enterprise software. He began in software development at Cadence Design Systems, then held roles at McKinsey & Company, The McKenna Group, and Siebel Systems, before joining SAP in 2004. Over roughly nine years at SAP he rose to Chief Operating Officer of SAP India, where his organization is reported to have closed on the order of 2,000 enterprise deals a year — an operating background that heavily informs his focus on go-to-market and distribution.

In January 2013, Goyal moved into venture capital as a Partner at Helion Venture Partners, where he led enterprise-software and services investments. His Helion-era deals included Whatfix, Axtria, Pipemonk (acquired by Freshdesk), and LinguaNext (acquired by Fidel Technologies). He carried that enterprise-software thesis into Stellaris, where he concentrates on the software stack from end-user applications down to infrastructure, and increasingly on AI's potential to reinvent enterprise software and services.

Goyal is an alumnus of IIT Delhi (undergraduate), the University of Texas at Austin, and INSEAD. Beyond investing, he is a co-founder of Plaksha University and one of the founding trustees of CAPED, an NGO focused on cervical-cancer awareness and prevention. He is known within the ecosystem for maintaining a "spreadsheet of his misses" — a personal log of deals he passed on — as a discipline for improving investment judgment.

Under Goyal and his co-founders, Stellaris has scaled across three funds: roughly $100M in Fund I (2017), $225M in Fund II (2021), and a $300M Fund III closed in 2024–25, with a significant portion earmarked for AI-native startups.

• Stage: Early stage, entering at seed and Series A; over 60% of investments are made at "inception" stage — before a product is built, sometimes before a line of code exists.
• Concentration over volume: Stellaris deliberately does ~8–10 new deals a year, favoring a concentrated, high-conviction portfolio over spraying capital.
• Check size: Typically $1M–$10M, sized to stage and valuation.
• Core sectors: Enterprise SaaS, developer/infrastructure software, and AI-native software; plus tech-enabled consumer, fintech, healthtech, edtech, and cleantech.
• Distribution is the differentiator: A signature Goyal line — *"A great product gives the company its right to exist, but great distribution is what gives it the right to succeed."* His SAP operating background makes go-to-market and sales motion central to his diligence.
• Conviction, not consensus: In his own framing, founders should *"have the courage to back your gut — never borrow conviction."* He looks for founders with an original, non-consensus point of view.
• AI stance: He views AI as a chance to rebuild enterprise software and services from scratch, and has earmarked Fund III capital specifically for AI-native companies — while cautioning that conviction and durable moats, not hype, drive the decision.