Haystack

Semil Shah is founding partner and has been the firm's investing engine since 2013, with early positions in DoorDash, Instacart, Figma, HashiCorp and Applied Intuition. He appeared on the Forbes Midas List of top seed investors in 2022, 2023 and 2024, a rare three-year run for a fund of Haystack's size.

Aashay Sanghvi is a partner and runs investment activity end to end, from identifying companies through post-investment support of portfolio management teams; he studied economics and history at Harvard. Divya Dhulipala is a principal, invests across stages and also owns capital formation and The Alignment Summit, the firm's convening event; she holds an economics degree from Duke. Three investors is the whole bench, which is the point: Haystack sells founder access to a partner, not a platform team.

Semil Shah founded Haystack in 2013 and has run it as a deliberately small pre-seed vehicle ever since, raising a new fund roughly every two years rather than scaling assets. Fund V and Fund VI were each $50 million, with Fund VI announced in December 2021 under the banner of a new fund and the same model. Haystack VII closed at $75 million in September 2023, and Haystack VIII at $79 million in May 2025.

The firm writes $500,000 to $2 million initial checks and will lead or participate, which keeps it viable as a first institutional check in rounds that larger seed funds have grown past. Shah has been explicit that fund sizes have crept up only modestly on purpose: the strategy depends on owning a meaningful position in a very early round rather than deploying capital at scale, and the returns come from concentration in a small number of outcomes.