Co-founder and CEO, LetsVenture (now LVX) | Founded 2013 | Bengaluru
An electrical engineer from Sindri
Shanti Mohan trained as an electrical engineer at the Birsa Institute of Technology in Sindri, in what is now Jharkhand. It was an unusual place to start for someone who would spend her career around software, startups and money. The engineering degree, though, sent her into the hardware end of technology first.
Her early career was in embedded systems, the small computers that sit inside devices and run them. YourStory reports that she co-founded two companies in that space, Premium Logic Systems and Ionic Microsystems. Entrepreneur India dates Ionic, a Bengaluru embedded systems company, to the early 2000s.
A founder before she was an investor
Ionic is where she learned what it takes to fund a company from the founder’s side of the table. According to Entrepreneur India, it raised angel money and then a Series A round before she exited the business. In a 2021 profile, Entrepreneur India described her investing career as growing out of that experience as a founder-operator.
After the exit she joined Hewlett-Packard, first as a section and senior programme manager. From 2004 she worked in product management in HP’s Personal Systems Group, in India and then in the United States. YourStory reports that she launched the HP App Store there. Building an app store taught her how a marketplace works: how supply and demand find each other, and what product-market fit looks like when thousands of sellers meet thousands of buyers.
Coming home with a different idea
Back in India, she began volunteering with The Open Door Foundation, an NGO that provides food, education and healthcare to children in need. Crowdfunding was then catching on around the world, and she started studying it. Her first plan, YourStory reports, was a platform that would connect non-profits with donors.
The idea shifted as people around her kept bringing up the same problem. Founders in her network asked her to introduce them to investors. In Entrepreneur India’s account, her peers told her that founders struggled to get in front of investors, and that raising even a small cheque was tedious. “The idea pivoted to building an online marketplace for the startup ecosystem,” she said.
2013: LetsVenture
In 2013 she co-founded LetsVenture with Sanjay Jha, who became its chief technology officer. She described the goal to Entrepreneur India as “making the process of discovery and connect easy and transparent for both founders and investors.” The first beta went live that year.
It was a hard thing to sell at first. YourStory reports that many people doubted that the sensitive details of a fundraise could be shared online at all. Early rounds on the platform were small. The minimum cheque was ₹5 lakh, and typical rounds were around ₹1.5 crore to ₹2 crore.
Well-known investors signed up early. Anupam Mittal, Rajan Anandan, Ratan Tata, Mohandas Pai, Nandan Nilekani and Sharad Sharma all joined. “The idea behind LetsVenture was to put out a marketplace, which will create transparency, access,” she told YourStory.
Raising money for the people who raise money
LetsVenture also had to fund itself. Business Insider reported that it raised ₹4 crore from 21 angel investors in 2014. In October 2015 it raised a Series A round led by Accel Partners and Anupam Mittal, with Times Internet, Singapore Angels and IDG Ventures India among 18 investors. By then the platform had 1,200 investors from 20 countries and had helped 53 startups raise about $17 million. “LetsVenture has unlocked a new category of angel investors online,” Mohan said at the time.
The next year brought one of the platform’s most important additions: lead syndicates. An experienced angel leads a deal and newer investors co-invest alongside, which brought many first-time angels into startup investing. YourStory reports that about half of the platform’s investors were new to angel investing.
Talk of a funding slowdown did not show up in LetsVenture’s numbers. At the company’s LetsIgnite conference in March 2017, Mohan said almost twice as much money had been raised on the platform in 2016 as in 2015. “For us, it was not a funding winter but rather global warming,” she said, Inc42 reported. By then it had facilitated 105 deals worth nearly $40 million. “We still don’t have a marketing role at LetsVenture,” she added.
From a deal room to a full platform
From 2017 the product line widened. LV Titan served family offices. LetsVenture Plus offered growth-stage and ESOP deals to wealthy investors. A cap table and ESOP management tool for startups later became its own business, Trica, which YourStory reported raised a $3 million seed round in October 2021. “We are a technology platform and have always been,” she told YourStory in 2020.
The numbers kept climbing. By late 2020, YourStory reported, 260 companies had been funded through the platform. Of those, 64 had raised a next round and about 26 had been acquired or merged, and it had received requests from 7,000 investors in 55 countries. Entrepreneur India reported in March 2021 that startups on LetsVenture had raised $201 million across 332 rounds, and that early-stage deals doubled from 55 in 2019 to 105 in 2020.
Companies that raised money through the platform include Khatabook, Classplus, Yulu, Airmeet, Agnikul, Trell and SUGAR Cosmetics. In 2021 LetsVenture also announced a women’s angel network to bring more women into early-stage investing. She called it “the first of its kind” in the country.
Mohan also invests personally. In December 2021 she told Entrepreneur India that she backs founders above ideas, which can change. “What remains constant in this change is the founder’s belief in what he or she is building,” she said.
LetsVenture becomes LVX
In July 2025 LetsVenture rebranded as LVX. It expanded from early-stage investing into growth-stage funding, with three arms: LVX Start for angel networks and an angel fund, LVX Grow for later-stage capital, and LVX School for education on fundraising and capital structure. In 2024 it had added LV Debt, for founders who want capital without giving up equity.
Entrepreneur India reported that LVX has more than 900 portfolio companies and an investor network of over 14,000. Mohan remains co-founder and CEO. She said the platform was being built for “India@2047”.
More than a decade after its first beta, the platform she built to make startup fundraising open and easier to navigate has become one of the main routes into angel investing in India.
Founder Journeys is a Sakhi Sangini series telling the stories of women who built businesses in India. This story is based on public interviews and reporting.
Cover photo: supplied to Sakhi Sangini.
Sources: YourStory (October 2020; October 2021); Entrepreneur India (March 2021; December 2021; July 2025); Business Insider India (October 2015); Inc42 (March 2017).
