Sandipan Mondal is an investor at Yali Capital with over 15 years of experience as an entrepreneur, operator, and product leader. He co-founded Zapr Media Labs and helped build it, over a decade, into one of India’s leading media-tech and conversational AI companies, backed by investors including Disney, Fox, and Flipkart, before its acquisition by Samsung. Over the course of that journey, he worked across product, growth, fundraising, enterprise partnerships, and scaling teams across India and international markets. Following the acquisition, Sandipan worked at Samsung in a product leadership role, focusing on post-merger integration and helping bridge startup innovation with the scale and complexity of a global technology company. Soon after he returned to his entrepreneurial roots, building at the intersection of consumer tech, education and AI. At Yali Capital, Sandipan partners with founders building deep-tech and frontier technology companies from India. As a founder turned investor, he brings deep empathy for the entrepreneurial journey and aims to support founders not just on business strategy and execution, but also through the emotional and personal challenges that come with building enduring companies. Sandipan holds an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York.
My path to venture capital came unexpectedly, after more than a decade of building startups and working with incredible founders, teams, customers, and investors. Founding and scaling a company taught me firsthand how difficult it is to create real value from scratch, and how important founder judgement becomes when navigating ambiguity across product-market fit, hiring, capital, timing, and strategy.
It also taught me that building a meaningful company requires far more than technical excellence or product strategy. It takes resilience, hustle, storytelling, humility, patience, and a deep sense of responsibility to create value for customers, teams, and all stakeholders. There are very few journeys as rewarding, or as demanding, as building from zero.
After business school, my co-founders and I built Zapr Media Labs. Over more than a decade, we worked to build one of India’s leading media-tech startups, and later expanded into conversational AI well before the current wave of excitement around generative AI. We were fortunate to be backed by exceptional strategic and financial partners, and even more fortunate to work with a team that helped us build something of real scale and substance. That journey eventually culminated in an acquisition by Samsung.
I stayed on through the post-merger phase at Samsung, where I worked on integration and related strategic initiatives. After that, I took a sabbatical, travelled, and became a scuba diving divemaster. I then returned to building and spent the next chapter working on an AI-led edtech venture that was perhaps a little early for its time and ran into strong macro headwinds in the sector. It was a difficult but deeply instructive experience.
After fifteen years as a founder, I decided to move into venture capital, not because I wanted to step away from entrepreneurship, but because I wanted to stay close to it in a different way. Yali - and the incredible team here - felt like the right place for that transition. It gives me the opportunity to keep learning, sharpen my craft as an investor, and most importantly support the next generation of founders in India with both conviction and empathy. I care deeply about backing ambitious people building difficult things, and I hope to be the kind of investor I would have wanted on the other side of the table during my founder days.
