Mantis Venture Capital is the firm The Chainsmokers founded. Gaurav Bhogale just made partner there, becoming the first non-founding partner in the firm’s history. You might think that they’re a consumer fund given the background of the founders. And as Gaurav shared, you’d be dead wrong:
“What I usually tell founders is think of everything you think a DJ should be investing in. And we do absolutely none of that.”
Gaurav joined us to dig into how the firm actually pulls that off, and what it took to land the partner role.
TL;DR: Mantis runs a deliberate “plus one” strategy in pre-seed to Series A AI, cyber, healthcare, and aerospace and defense. The fund never leads, only follows, targeting 3-5% ownership alongside top firms. Gaurav walked through the muscle shift from lead investor to follow-on partner, how Mantis earns allocations next to Benchmark, why founder references are their most valuable asset, and the proactive deal flow strategy that got him hired in the first place.
The “Sexy Plus One” Model
Behind The Chainsmokers’ affiliation that gets all the attention, Mantis is a traditional enterprise software fund. Their focus areas are AI, cyber, healthcare, and aerospace and defense. Pre-seed to Series A. The positioning is deliberate.
“We never lead, we only follow. And we are very complimentary investors to all our favorite lead funds in the Valley.”
The value-add comes in two forms. On the talent side, by helping founders close hires and find the right people for key roles, and GTM acceleration, where the Chainsmokers’ social capital and the team’s network unlock customer intros and pipeline that most early-stage firms can’t touch.
Mantis closed Fund 3 at $100 million two years ago, and Fund 4 is in the works. Same sectors, same ownership target of 3-5%, same co-investment partners fund-over-fund.
How to Earn an Allocation Next to Benchmark
Working as the plus-one to firms like Benchmark and Accel sounds glamorous until you have to earn that allocation. Gaurav was direct about how Mantis approaches it.
“We want to make it easy for them. We want to come in, we want to run a quick, tight process. We want to have our own conviction.”
That conviction matters. Even when meeting a founder for the first time, the team has done its work on the thesis, talked to other players in the space, and is ready to move at the pace of the round. The right to win comes from references. As Gaurav said:
“…unless the founders you’ve worked with already give you a glowing reference and can back up the things you’ve said that you would do, I don’t think we’d get that allocation. So I think it’s an everyday zero for us.”
That “everyday zero” framing implies that past wins don’t carry over. Every new deal requires earning it again through the work Mantis is doing for the founders they’ve already backed.
Job Interview as Deal Flow Test
For anyone trying to break into a VC seat, the way Gaurav landed the Mantis role is worth studying. The conversations with the team weren’t really about the role. Drew, one of the Chainsmokers, would ask Gaurav about thesis sectors Mantis hadn’t covered and investments they might have missed. But the move that set Gaurav apart from other candidates wasn’t the analysis. It was doing the job before he had the job.
“I was able to send them, every two or three weeks (across a four to six month process), a couple of founders I thought were very notable and more importantly, were actionable at that point in time.”
The full conversation covers Gaurav’s path from eight years at Google to Harvard Business School to Galaxy Interactive to Mantis, what changed in his evaluation criteria after working with the Mantis founding team, how he flies planes out of Palo Alto with 300+ hours logged, and a half-serious pitch for a “Founders in Planes” podcast. Watch the full interview above.
