Manan Mehta

Manan Mehta is a Founding Partner of Unshackled Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm he co-founded in 2014 (with Nitin Pachisia) to back foreign-born entrepreneurs. A first-generation American, Mehta was trained as an engineer, receiving a B.S. in Materials Science & Engineering and a B.A. in Economics from UCLA in 2007. His interest in the immigrant-founder problem is personal: when he attempted to start his first company, his co-founder was in the U.S. on an H-1B visa and could not leave his sponsoring employer unless the new company could sponsor him — a barrier that requires capital and the right corporate structure. That experience became the seed of Unshackled's model.

Before founding Unshackled, Mehta ran marketing for the ed-tech startup Kno, which raised more than $90M from top VCs including Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, and Floodgate before being acquired by Intel in 2013. Earlier in his career, he was an investment banker at the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), where his most notable deal was the 2009 ~$1.9B acquisition of Skype led by Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz (later sold to Microsoft for $8.5B).

At Unshackled, Mehta built an unusually infrastructure-heavy fund: beyond capital, the firm provides full legal, visa, and immigration support — acting as an employer of record so immigrant founders can legally work on their companies from day one, while founders retain their IP and equity. The firm reports a 100% success rate across 100+ visa filings. Since 2014, Mehta and the firm have backed 80+ companies and supported 200+ entrepreneurs; Unshackled closed its third fund at $35M in June 2023 (with institutional LPs making up ~73% of the fund), and portfolio companies have collectively raised over $700M in follow-on capital.

• Invests in people, not traction: "We invest in people" and look for "extraordinary people with a bold vision." The firm says "we care less about what you have done before" and instead tries to understand "what makes the entrepreneur exceptional" — their "superpower."
• Day-0 / pre-incorporation stage: Aims to invest "as close to company formation, if not earlier," often before there is a product, revenue, or even an incorporated company.
• Immigrant-founder mandate: Every deal must have at least one non-U.S.-born founder. The thesis is that immigrant founders drive outsized returns but face a structural barrier (visas/immigration) that Unshackled uniquely removes.
• Check size & round construction: Initial checks of roughly $300K–$750K; leads pre-seed rounds of under $1M and favors founders who plan for that round to last 12–18+ months.
• Conviction-led and sector-agnostic: Concentrated, high-conviction bets across AI, enterprise SaaS, fintech, healthcare, food/ag, climate/energy, and space — described by Mehta as ranging "from plant-based proteins to cell towers in space."