Sugar -free capital collects an inaugural fund of $ 32 million to support the founders of the MIT at the start of the country

Sheena Jindal is from Boston.

She grew up there, attended the MIT and worked at the Boston Consulting Group for several years. She launched a startup, worked in a startup, then became an investor at Bessemer and Comcast Ventures (CV).

Last year, her worlds collided when she decided to launch her own fund, Sugar Free Capital, a company that focuses on investment in technical MIT founders. She caught LP, including the family offices of technological executives of heavy companies like NVIDIA and CITADEL, and announced on Monday the closure of the $ 32 million dollars in SUGAR Free.

A premise of the fund is in the name. While working at CV, she led dozens of transactions but found herself dismayed by the heaven assessments of the era 2021. She continued to refer to investment opportunities as “too sweet, in the sense that the assessments were too high,” she told Techcrunch.

From there, she has started to think about innovation in recent years and the way she focused on optimization. “But we are really entering the era of intelligence,” she said. She has designed a thesis around the idea that the capture of the age of intelligence would require two things: the technical founders, mainly those who have a “state of spirit of systems”, which the MIT brings, she added and concentration.

“Data has historically shown us that business returns are concentrated from a selected group of winners.”

The emphasis on MIT also has another reason. Unlike Harvard and Stanford, there is not a large class of former MIT students who are start -up investors, even if the founders of MIT continue and work in lucrative companies. “The people of MIT are in finance, but they participate in more quantitative roles,” she said-more hedge funds and advanced step.

This white space gives Jindal, a rare solo solo woman, an excessive opportunity. It plans to invest in 15 companies at the start of the start of the start (it has already supported four), writing checks ranging from $ 1 million to $ 5 million. The company focuses on the native IA infrastructure and chooses a new theme each quarter on which to focus. For example, this quarter, she is looking for companies focused on physical AI, optimization of the data center and AI agents.

Sugar Free has already supported a defense company, a game company and a company in the automation of workflow. Jindal hopes to reduce at least four to five checks per year. A large part of the Inbound is the holding of founders or references, but it is open to the awareness of the cold.

Overall, Jindal is lucky about this fund. The fundraising environment has been and is difficult for many general practitioners, especially solo women, and in particular women. She said LP liked her business gave good access to MIT talents and had a clear thesis.

“We are in the transition period between this new world order of indigenous AI technology and the infrastructure and commercial models of the past,” said Jindal. “I am delighted to see how we are able to harmoniously combine these two in terms of infrastructure, technology and human experience, and for me, it’s really exciting.”