A spectacular 280x exit from Oyo Rooms in 2016 made Sanjay Mehta a celebrity in India’s venture capital circles. It hasn’t been a one-off either, even though Mehta is the first to insist that no one can predict these things. Other notable deals he made include a partial exit at Block.One, a blockchain company backed by Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley billionaire co-founder of PayPal, and, more recently, Indian logistics intelligence startup Loginext, where Mehta got a 16x return. 

While Mehta (50) has invested his personal wealth in over a hundred startups through his family office, Mehta Ventures, his most interesting innings might have started only two years ago. In December 2019, 100X.VC, which Mehta started with like-minded partners, took in its first ‘class’ of startups—20 of them. Today Class 05 is open, and the first four classes add up to a portfolio of 50 startups. 

"The mission is to invest in a 100 startups every year,” says Mehta in an interview with Forbes India. And the idea behind that is to showcase startups by committing his own money to them, he says. This brings both visibility and credibility to those startups, which helps them in raising larger, subsequent rounds of funding as they grow. 

Read more at: Inside Sanjay Mehta's ambition to build India's Y Combinator at 100X.VC