Chetan Puttagunta

Chetan Puttagunta (born May 14, 1986, in Hyderabad, India) is an American venture capitalist and General Partner at Benchmark. Born to chemist parents who emigrated to the United States, he grew up in Maryland, attended Quince Orchard High School, and earned a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2007. He began his career in technology M&A investment banking at Houlihan Lokey and later worked at H.I.G. Capital in San Francisco before moving into venture capital.

In 2011 he joined New Enterprise Associates (NEA), where he was promoted to General Partner in 2016 and spent seven years focused on enterprise software and open-source-driven businesses. During his NEA tenure he backed and served on the boards of companies including MongoDB (IPO 2017), Elastic (IPO 2018), and MuleSoft (acquired by Salesforce for roughly $6.5–6.8B in 2018). In July 2018, at age 32, he joined Benchmark as a General Partner — one of the firm's equal partners who each make a small number of high-conviction, board-level investments per year.

At Benchmark, Puttagunta has become one of the firm's most active AI-era investors, with a stated conviction that enormous value will accrue to the AI application layer. He currently serves on the boards of Elastic (as Chairman), Modern Treasury, Legora, Airbyte, LangChain, Starcloud, Duffel, and others. He was named to Forbes' 30 Under 30 in Venture Capital in 2015 and has appeared on the Forbes Midas List of top global investors for several consecutive years, ranking #89 on the 2026 Midas List.

• Invests at the earliest institutional stage (seed/Series A) in enterprise software, developer tools, databases/infrastructure, and — most recently — AI applications, typically leading the round and joining the board.
• Strong conviction in the AI application layer: he argues that as scaling shifts from pre-training toward test-time/inference compute, AI development is democratizing and "tremendous value will be created by AI apps," citing Benchmark's early entry into Cursor, HeyGen, and Mercor.
• Frames the opportunity around workflow disruption in a ~$1 trillion/year global B2B software + IT-services market (per his Adams Street conversation), betting AI will redefine core enterprise workflows.
• Favors a "go slow to go fast" philosophy toward software building and company formation — deep, deliberate early product work over premature scaling (the theme of his earlier *Invest Like the Best* appearance).
• Operates within Benchmark's model of few, concentrated bets rather than a spray-and-pray portfolio — meaning conviction, founder quality, and category leadership matter more than momentum.