- Sri Pangulur started his own syndicate while working as a sales executive in Silicon Valley.
- He used that union experience to work in venture capital at Tribe Capital.
- Last year, he joined Mayfield to co-lead his Select/Spring Fund, targeting new Series B investments.
Sri Pangulur embraced the after-work hustle to invest in early-stage startups. By day, he was CloudFlare’s director of sales. But after work, he spent up to 15 hours a week attending hackathons, meetups and venture events to find the next hot startup.
There were many times when Pangulur jumped right into the pursuit of a deal after a long day’s work. He recalled when his CloudFlare team closed a high-stakes deal late on a Friday at the end of a quarter. But instead of celebrating with this team, he met with hot stage company.
“I was also trying to get into a fairly high seed round that had very little allocation left in the trade,” he said, adding that he had to really beg to get a spot. After talking with the CEO until midnight, Pangulur entered into the deal.
He began his investment efforts by writing small checks, but soon found himself inundated with the flow of transactions. He decided to formally create a syndicate called Overtime VC, investing up to $250,000 in seed rounds and Series A. Through Overtime, Pangulur has invested nearly $20 million in 65 companies with a focus on infrastructure and applications the enterprise. Among those startups in his portfolio are Abnormal Security, currently valued at $5.1 billion, and Airbyte, now valued at $1.5 billion.
Pangulur met Mayfield Fund managing partner Navin Chaddha through investments. In 2016, the two met at a tech networking event and stayed in touch, discussing industry trends and collaborating on deals.
“This guy is going to go places,” Chaddha recalled of his first impressions of Pangulur. Seven years later, Pangulur joined Mayfield as a partner.
Path to VC
Born in Michigan and raised in Ohio, Pangulur grew up in a family of doctors. He originally pre-med at Case Western University, intending to follow in his family’s footsteps. But as the dot-com bubble popped in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Pangulur decided to pursue funding.
After college, he worked in the M&A team at KeyBanc Capital Markets and then joined Lehman Brothers, focusing on software investments. He also got a taste of venture capital at TeleSoft Partners, an early-stage firm, before moving into operations.
Over the next decade, Pangulur worked in a number of sales roles, eventually arriving at CloudFlare to lead one of the company’s first North American sales teams. At CloudFlare, he gained experience selling to CTOs and CISOs from startups to Fortune 500 companies.
He also continued to invest through his syndicate, Overtime VC, and brought those first-hand experiences to the founders he advised.
Pangulur helped the founders with recruiting, answering questions like, “Who is the first VP of sales you should hire? What does that profile look like and how does it evolve over time as you grow up?”
The overtime business continued to grow, and then he said he considered whether he wanted to work for one company most of the time or work with many contractors full-time rather than on the side.
“That’s when I realized I should venture out,” he said.
“Cooked” at the B series
Pangulur began raising his own venture fund based on the success of his syndicated fund, Overtime VC. But a few months after raising the funds, he received an unexpected offer from Tribe Capital, a venture capital firm that uses data science to invest in crypto and software startups.
With Tribe’s $1.6 billion in assets under management, Pangulur was drawn to the idea of writing bigger checks and advising founders as a board member. “I decided to take that leap,” he said.
At Tribe, Pangulur developed the firm’s software investment practice. Focusing on enterprise infrastructure and software-as-a-service, Pangulur has led six deals, including sales intelligence startup Apollo, which is now valued at $1.6 billion.
Last September, Pangulur joined Mayfield. “I wasn’t actively looking to make a move,” he said, but after working with Chaddha over the years through Overtime and Tribe, Pangulur was intrigued by a new opportunity to join the company.
He and Chaddha met for a one-on-one meeting in the fall of 2022. “I went into the meeting thinking it would be a normal recovery,” Pangulur said. “But then he told me about the opportunity he saw in the market for the Spring Fund.”
Mayfield is one of Silicon Valley’s oldest venture firms, with $3 billion in assets under management. While the firm has traditionally invested in seed stages and Series A — it announced its seventeenth fund of $580 million focused on seed and Series A in 2023 — there was still a gap in the investment market.
“Our Select/Spring fund is for founders who are beyond the ideation stage, with a team, early product-market fit and initial market adoption,” Chaddha said. “Their funding stage is usually at A prime or Series B.”
The firm first raised a $125 million spring fund in 2016 to invest in its portfolio companies for further investments. Last year, Mayfield raised a $375 million Select III/Spring fund with the goal of focusing the vast majority of its investments on new external opportunities.
Pangulur was brought in to co-lead the firm’s Select/Spring fund with Chaddha.
“He came from a background in sales,” Chaddha said. “He invests at a stage where products and customers already exist – his go-to-market expertise is his superpower.”
This is the stage “where you have to get in the weeds, work with the founders, help them cook something up,” Pangulur said.
Earlier this month, Pangulur announced two new investments he led: a $25 million Series B for billing infrastructure startup Orb and a $28 million Series B for TeamBridge, a launched workforce operating software company.
Despite the generally warm funding market, Pangulur is optimistic. “The spring fund is a relatively new initiative,” Pangulur said. “I want us to be one of the first calls a lot of founders make when they hit that inflection point between being early stage and finding those early elements of product-market fit and go-to-market repeatability.”