Today at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women International Summit in Riyadh, Aarthi Ramamurthy sits down to—once again—have a good time.
A former engineer at Meta, Netflix, and Microsoft, Ramamurthy has since 2020 hosted an online talk show—originally called The Good Time Show—with her husband Sriram Krishnan, former Andreessen Horowitz general partner and current White House senior AI policy advisor. Now, at MPW Riyadh, she’s unveiling her own VC firm as a solo GP, called Schema Ventures, which launches with a $20 million first fund.
“If you ask a VC firm, any venture capitalist, they’ll be like: ‘Oh, too many funds, lots of VC firms out there, I don’t think we need any more partners,’” said Ramamurthy. “But if you ask founders, there’s still such a big gap. I’ve been through this journey, being this outsider coming into Silicon Valley. And now I’ve been in SF for about half my life and I have all the access and connections—but it wasn’t easy to get in and break into that circle and that ecosystem. Schema is basically that culmination.”
Ramamurthy comes to her fund as both an outsider and an insider.
“I come from India, small town, recruited straight out of college, worked at big tech companies, worked at Microsoft, worked with Netflix, Facebook,” she said. “But when I came to the U.S., I’d actually never traveled outside of India. So, I packed my suitcase and showed up. I didn’t have any network, no connections, no access, and sort of figured it out as I went.”
Schema’s LPs include big Silicon Valley names like Marc Andreessen, Garry Tan, Elad Gil, Gokul Rajaram, Charlie Songhurst, Leo Polovets, and Lachy Groom. Y Combinator’s fund-of-funds is also an LP.
Schema will focus on early-stage investments and writing collaborative checks, with an eye on companies in developer tools and back-end infrastructure software. The firm has already made a number of investments, including solar panel-focused robotics company Cosmic Robotics, back-office healthcare operations startup Confido Health, and law firm workflow software startup Powerhouse.
“I look at Schema as: How do you move away from the hype cycle and just truly find contrarian founders?” said Ramamurthy. “Not for the sake of being contrarian, but because they’re actually doing something that’s a personal problem for them. I think that’s really unique for me, and that’s what I like to do.”
