Tarun Chitra is a co-founder and partner at Robot Ventures, an early-stage crypto venture capital firm he launched. See sector focus and contact routes.
Tarun Chitra is a co-founder and partner at Robot Ventures, an early-stage crypto venture capital firm he launched in 2019 alongside Robert Leshner, while also serving as CEO of Gauntlet, a crypto network simulation platform. His investment thesis targets highly technical cryptocurrency and DeFi primitives at the pre-seed and seed stages, focusing on unconventional projects in the crypto, Web3, AI, and fintech sectors. Typical check sizes range from $100,000 to $1 million for pre-seed deals (median ~$500K) and $500,000 to over $5 million for seed rounds, with the firm available to lead or follow on promising companies. Notable portfolio companies include Polymarket, Monad, LayerZero, MegaETH, and Compound, reflecting a portfolio of 192+ investments across 156 rounds. Chitra distinguishes himself by leveraging deep quantitative research and on-chain economic design to evaluate complex DeFi mechanisms that generalist VCs often miss, a perspective rooted in his background at D.E. Shaw Research and Vatic Labs. He has also founded Aera, a decentralized protocol for DAO finance management, further demonstrating his focus on economic design in crypto
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