Alok Nandan

Alok Nandan is a Silicon Valley investor and operator who currently serves as Co-Founder and Managing Partner of First Rays Venture Partners, a seed-stage fund (founded with Amit Sridharan) that backs enterprise infrastructure software for the AI era. He spent roughly four years (circa 2016–2020) as a Partner at Emergent Ventures, where he made pre-seed and seed investments in software-infrastructure and SaaS companies. The email and phone associated with his Emergent Ventures tenure remain his listed angel-investor contact.

His operating career was built in product. He began at Microsoft as a senior/group product manager working on Windows Azure cloud, then was an early product leader at YuMe, a video-advertising company that he helped grow through its IPO on the NYSE. He later served as Director of Product Management at Tempo AI, which was acquired by Salesforce in 2016. Earlier, he co-founded ToneThis Inc. (2003), a mobile-technology startup that reportedly surpassed one million downloads. He is a co-inventor on three technology patents.

Academically, Nandan holds a B.Tech in Computer Science & Engineering from IIT Kharagpur and a Master's and Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA, plus executive education in marketing from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. This deep technical grounding underpins his focus on infrastructure-heavy, enterprise-grade startups.

• Invests at pre-seed and seed (occasionally early Series A) in B2B enterprise software, with a sweet-spot check around $500K (roughly $500K–$1M).
• At First Rays, targets four areas where "durable moats emerge": data infrastructure for agent-driven systems, AI agents that automate workflows, AI-native cybersecurity, and vertical software replacing legacy service businesses.
• Core themes carry through from his Emergent days: AI, cloud-edge-data orchestration, and automation across the enterprise stack.
• Emphasizes domain expertise and identifying buyer pain — he looks for founders who deeply understand a specific market's core problem and the economic buyer behind it.
• Brings hands-on, beyond-capital support, especially helping startups land their early customers in AI, enterprise, and developer communities — leveraging his own product-leadership background.