Aarthi Ramamurthy launches VC firm Schema Ventures with first fund of $20 million

Silicon Valley technologist and podcaster Aarthi Ramamurthy on Wednesday launched her venture capital firm, Schema Ventures, with a $20 million fund.

The fund will back early-stage startups founded by "exceptional outsider founders", Ramamurthy said in posts on LinkedIn and X. "I grew up an outsider. I moved to San Francisco, built two startups. My story — figuring it out without a roadmap — is the blueprint for Schema," the post read.



Schema will focus on the earliest stages of a company in various fields, including industrial software, robots and intelligence for factories, construction and logistics, workflow intelligence and developer tools.

Ramamurthy, who has previously headed product and tech teams at Microsoft, Netflix and Meta, said her fund will back outsiders who build from lived experience, not "pedigree or proximity".

"Sometimes there’s no pitch deck yet, no co-founder, no capital — just conviction and technical insight. That’s where we come in," she said.

The entrepreneur became a media personality in 2020, when she launched a Clubhouse show with her husband Sriram Krishnan, former Andreessen Horowitz general partner and current White House senior AI policy advisor. The show, titled ‘The Good Time Show’, featured organic conversations about startups, venture capitalism, and cryptocurrencies. It had high-profile guests like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

The show later transitioned to YouTube and evolved into ‘The Aarthi and Sriram Show’, which secured a podcasting deal with iHeartMedia and amassed over a million downloads by early 2023.