Mahesh Murthy

Mahesh Murthy (born 11 September 1965) is an Indian marketer, entrepreneur, and early-stage investor. He studied chemical engineering at Osmania University but dropped out young, and began his career in unglamorous roles — including selling vacuum cleaners at Eureka Forbes — before entering advertising. He worked at agencies including FCB Ulka and Trikaya Grey in India and Ogilvy & Mather in Hong Kong, where he became a creative lead on brands such as Unilever, Pepsi, MTV, and The Economist. In 1993 he co-directed MTV films that were recognized in the Cannes Lions New Directors Showcase.

He moved to the US in the mid-1990s, joining Silicon Valley/Portland agency CKS Partners as a Creative Director and Partner, where he worked on early digital work for Yahoo (its first graphical interface, ~1995) and Amazon's "Earth's Biggest Bookstore" launch campaign (1997). He later served as VP of Marketing at iCat in Seattle (subsequently acquired by Intel) and as General Manager of Channel [V] in India.

Murthy's investing career began in 2000 when he founded the angel fund Passionfund, backing companies such as Geodesic, WebDunia, Tulleeho, Compassbox, and EBSDirect. In 2004 he founded Pinstorm, one of India's first digital marketing agencies, known for pioneering a pay-for-performance/outcome-based model. In 2006 he teamed with Pravin Gandhi and Bharati Jacob to co-found Seedfund, one of India's earliest institutional venture funds (with LPs reportedly including Google and Motorola), which was twice voted India's best VC fund (Venture Intelligence awards for its first and second funds, 2009 and 2013).

More recently he has operated through Intanj, a UAE-based holding company spanning strategic deep-tech products (satellites, drones, cybersecurity), investments, and consumer businesses, and invests actively via AngelSpark, a UAE angel syndicate. He has also been a public commentator and columnist (Wall Street Journal, BusinessWorld, Business Today), a LinkedIn "Power Profile" and Quora Top Writer, and a prominent campaigner against Facebook's Free Basics in India (2015–2016). In 2018 he faced sexual-harassment allegations, which he denied; the Bombay High Court quashed the related case in 2019.

• Invests at the seed / earliest stage, historically through Seedfund in India and now through AngelSpark in the UAE and beyond.
• Seedfund explicitly targets "outliers": founders who "don't just follow demand" but "identify unknown needs," combining "strong conviction" with "grounded plans" and disciplined execution.
• Sector-agnostic but consumer- and internet-heavy: e-commerce, automotive, media/sports, consumer retail, edtech, and marketing tech, expanding into space/deep tech and foodtech more recently.
• Bias toward capital-efficient businesses with measurable returns — a philosophy mirrored in his Pinstorm model, where "every engagement is evaluated by its expected return on invested capital... if the expected return does not justify the risk, Pinstorm does not take on the client."
• Note: Seedfund itself states it is "not investing in new companies at this time" — new activity now runs primarily through AngelSpark/Intanj.