About Me
I’m Anupam Rastogi, an early-stage VC based in the SF Bay Area partnering early with ambitious founders building consequential Enterprise AI, infrastructure, and deep-tech companies.
I’m a Managing Partner at Emergent Ventures, where I invest primarily at the seed and early stages and work closely with founders through the highest-leverage moments of company-building: finding PMF, designing and scaling GTM, hiring leaders, fundraising, and navigating strategic forks in the road.
Over the years, I’ve partnered closely with 35+ founding teams globally, with outcomes including IPOs across three continents, several successful acquisitions, and companies that have gone on to define and lead their categories. I’ve been focused on Enterprise and B2B AI for the past decade.
I write Enterprise AI Field Notes, a series of essays on how AI companies get adopted, bought, deployed, and scaled.
The goal is to go beyond generic AI commentary and get closer to the real operating questions that determine which Enterprise AI and GTM approaches break out, and how. These are the questions I spend much of my time on with founders, CXOs, operators, and investors.
My Background
I’m a builder at heart, an engineer by training, and a venture investor by vocation.
Before Emergent, I founded NX Partners to help high-potential AI and SaaS companies accelerate go-to-market. Earlier, I led Intelligent Enterprise investing at NGP Capital, a global venture firm with $1.6B AUM, where I worked across enterprise software, AI, SaaS, cloud, and global technology markets.
Before venture, I worked in product, GTM, engineering, and research roles across startups and larger technology companies. I shipped four enterprise products, helped stand up a big data analytics stack inside a Fortune 100 company, and authored five international patents and deep-tech publications.
My academic background spans Computer Science at IIT Delhi, innovation at MIT, and business at Wharton.
How I invest and help
I’m most drawn to founders combining technical ambition, deep customer empathy, high learning velocity, and a willingness to attack complex markets before they become obvious.
The companies I gravitate toward usually sit at the intersection of:
- urgent enterprise pain
- technical depth
- large budget pools
- pre-obvious market timing
- complexity that can become a moat
- a path to category leadership
I spend significant time with CXOs and senior executives to understand how AI adoption is evolving: where budgets are moving, what buyers trust, how procurement decisions happen, and which categories are emerging. That market proximity informs both how I invest and how I support founders.
Founders I partner with can expect:
- Hands-on GTM expertise across the PMF journey, from ICP, messaging, pricing, and sales motion to early revenue loops, team scaling, and repeatable scale.
- Truth-seeking without theatrics, candid feedback, clear thinking, and pattern recognition while staying in the founder’s corner.
- A network that matters in context, including customers, executives, future investors, and functional leaders, introduced when the timing is right.
What I write about
My writing focuses on the operating reality behind Enterprise AI company-building:
- Enterprise AI adoption
- AI-native GTM
- Founder-led sales and early PMF
- AI infrastructure and deep-tech company-building
- Budget positioning, procurement, and enterprise buying behavior
- Services-as-software and new AI-native operating models
- Lessons from CXOs deploying AI in production
- How breakout AI companies scale
Much of the writing is informed by patterns I’m seeing across portfolio companies, Enterprise AI founders, operator conversations, and the Emergent AI CXO Network.
Stay in touch
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