TEAM Angels, the founder-led investment collective within the Tech Entrepreneurs Association of Mumbai (TEAM), is nearing its first set of investments after months of groundwork. It has taken multiple companies into its investment committee, and two are now on track to receive funding.
“We are currently very close to investing in two companies. So hopefully in the next 30 to 40 days, you will hear from us… where we would be making our initial investments,” Dhruvil Sanghvi, chief executive officer of LogiNext and a member of TEAM governing council, said.
Investment Focus
The syndicate, which was announced at the 2025 edition of the Mumbai Tech Week, is writing cheques in the `5 lakh–`1.5 crore range and plans to complete around 10 deals in the next six to nine months, with most announcements aligned to Mumbai Tech Week. “One of the criteria that we have is to obviously promote entrepreneurs from Mumbai and Maharashtra… for at least majority of the founding team to be locally based,” he said.
TEAM Angels follows a compliant founder-driven structure where individual members invest through external SPVs. “It’s not a fund. It’s a syndicate. That means all these angels come together and directly invest via a special purpose vehicle (SPV),” Sanghvi said.
The investment lens is sharply focused on AI-native companies. “Our clear focus is we are a bit more biased towards real AI… the meaningful application of AI,” he said, adding that sectors such as finance, healthcare, and B2B SaaS are seeing the most traction. This ability to differentiate “real AI versus fake AI,” he noted, comes from the maturity of founders who have built and scaled tech businesses over decades, Sanghvi added.
Building the Ecosystem
Beyond capital, TEAM is widening Mumbai’s access to high-quality tech talent through initiatives that directly bridge engineers, founders, and investors. Mumbai Hacks has increasingly become that funnel — and not just in terms of hiring. Sanghvi noted that unlike typical hackathons that remain theoretical, this edition created solutions ready for real-world deployment, enabling investors to engage with teams immediately. “We are offering direct access to team angels, we are offering them direct access to funds like Activate… and that’s when this hackathon turns into an opportunity or a platform or a launchpad for real companies,” he said.
The hiring pipeline generated by the event has also been unusually active. “Companies (present at the event) got 50-150 applications,” Sanghvi said, adding that founders were able to assess participants directly and shortlist qualified candidates based on live problem-solving. This includes startups and established IT companies like HCLTech which had announced it is looking to fulfil up to 100 AI-related roles.
The talent and investor matching efforts will flow into the 2026 edition of the Mumbai Tech Week, which will introduce a pitch-fest model to showcase early-stage startups to India’s top seed investors. The idea is to turn MTW into a founder-investor marketplace where teams emerging from the hackathon and TEAM’s broader community can present real, deployable AI products. “We are looking to back early-stage founders and make it more of a pitch fest,” Sanghvi said.