Here’s why this venture capital firm sees boundless opportunities in AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly gaining traction around the world, whether it's enterprise-level AI or a consumer-facing company focusing on AI-driven sales. For Boundless Ventures, the venture capital firm led by Natasha Malpani, AI is not just one area of interest: it’s the area where it's dedicating its investments.

Malpani, who is the daughter-in-law of Motilal Oswal Financial Services founder Motilal Oswal and married to his youngest son Pratik, has donned many hats. She is trained as an immunologist from Oxford, worked in cancer research, later invested in healthcare companies for a fund in the UK, and then even tried her hand at media. She founded Boundless Ventures in mid-2025, with the focus of backing early-stage companies that were serious about AI.

“When the ChatGPT moment happened, I was in the media, and it was the first actual use case to get disrupted. When you see what is possible in terms of creation, I was hit and decided to dedicate my time and energy to AI, as I had already been an investor,” Malpani told Business Today.

The first fund has raised around $35 million (around Rs 300 crore) and within just a year of launch, it has invested in 10 companies, with two more likely to be added soon.
 
The investments that Boundless has made so far are in diverse fields, from robotics to healthcare, space tech, travel and fashion, but all with the common thread of AI.

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“Boundless is an AI and frontier-tech fund. We come in very early – pre-seed or seed, and then we double down at every stage,” noted Malpani.
 
Some of the companies that Boundless Ventures has invested in include Armatrix, a company building intelligent robots; Knot, an AI-powered fashion delivery platform; PIersight, a space-tech startup building SAR (synthetic aperture radar) systems for maritime surveillance; and health tech platform Superhealth, among others.
 
According to Malpani, the idea is to do 25-30 deals, and typical cheque sizes range from $500,000 to $1 million.
 
“We have a global perspective; we look at Silicon Valley extremely closely. But we of course spend a lot of time in India; the team is in Bengaluru, and we have scouts in the valley and in London,” she pointed out.
 
Boundless organises startup community events, programmes and workshops in specific areas focusing on AI. It recently did a workshop involving consumer tech companies and teams from a US-based AI company.
 
“The frontier is changing and unknowable. So, we spend time with universities, with founders, AI researchers, developers and hyperscalers and we will build the market together,” said Malpani.

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Over the last couple of years, there have been massive AI-related developments, with companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, among others, releasing advanced high-capability models. A lot of investor money has also been chasing AI-related ideas in markets from the US to Korea and Taiwan. Has India missed the bus when it comes to big AI-related ideas?
 
Malpani says there are many companies in areas like space tech or robotics where cutting-edge work is happening, and that one should not draw a comparison with Silicon Valley in the US, where the tech scale is far larger.
 
“Perhaps specifically, we may not have created large language models or this transformer architecture, but most of the world didn’t. It will happen; it’s just a matter of time, and you will diversify; there will be small models too. Innovation is only just starting,” she stressed, adding a lot of disruption was coming our way in the next few years.
 
She pointed out how coding agents have already been disrupted; going ahead, knowledge work will get disrupted, workflows will change, and there will be disruption in front and back-office operations as well.
On the consumer side, there will be far more personalisation, search and discovery and multimodality in terms of how one interacts with the world, Malpani noted. Robotics will also lead to a major change in manufacturing, she added.

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