Anamitra Banerji

Anamitra Banerji is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Afore Capital, one of the leading pre-seed venture capital firms in the United States. He founded Afore in 2016 alongside Gaurav Jain with a mission to back exceptional founders before they have a product or traction. Under his leadership, the firm has grown from its debut fund to managing over $500M across four funds, with a 200-company portfolio collectively valued at over $13.5 billion.

Before founding Afore, Banerji was a Partner at Foundation Capital (2012-2016), where he joined initially as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence. His operator background made him a natural fit for venture — he joined Twitter in March 2009 as its 30th employee and first product manager, where he built out Twitter's advertising business from scratch. He conceptualized and launched Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends, and Promoted Accounts — the three foundational ad products that became Twitter's primary revenue engine.

Prior to Twitter, Banerji spent five years at Overture and Yahoo (2004-2009), working through Overture's acquisition by Yahoo in search marketing and product management. Earlier in his career, he co-founded PlanetHealthOnline, an internet healthcare company in India during the late 1990s, and spent four years as a software engineer in enterprise data systems.

Banerji holds an MBA in Strategy and Finance from Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management and a Bachelor's degree in Electronics Engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Jamshedpur, India.

• Afore Capital is built specifically for pre-seed investing — backing founders at the "pre-traction, pre-everything" stage, often before a company is even formed
• Invests $500K to $2M+ with high conviction in deeply product-oriented, technical founders
• Runs a distinctive Founders-in-Residence (FIR) program, investing $200K-$800K in exceptional people even when the idea is still forming
• With Fund IV, introduced "Pre-Seed 2.0" — a flexible investment approach that supports founders from ideation through product-market fit
• Sector-agnostic but drawn to founders building in fintech, AI, SaaS, developer tools, consumer, healthcare, and future-of-work categories
• Banerji's operator background (Twitter, Yahoo) gives him a product-first lens when evaluating pre-seed opportunities