Synapses launches $125mn VC fund for STEM innovations in climate & health tech

New Delhi, April 9: Synapse on Tuesday announced the launch of a $125 million venture capital fund to identify and support STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) based solutions for climate change and health.

Founded by IIT alumni and veteran investors, Ruchira Shukla and Karthik Chandrasekar, Synapse has a dedicated focus on climate tech and health tech and allows for deep domain depth and thesis-driven investing.

“Climate change and an increasing disease burden are the defining challenges of our generation. Synapses are built on the belief that science and technology hold the key to solving these challenges at scale, not just for India, but for the world,” said Ruchira Shukla, Co-founder and Managing Partner of Synapses.

We are nurturing a new generation of audacious, path breaking innovators and helping them build leading global technology businesses to deliver out sized financial returns, she added.

The fund named after the word Synapse, which refers to the connective tissue in our brains, seeks to become the connective tissue building collaborative connections between a varied set of global stakeholders working in climate and health.

The climate tech and health tech solutions needed today sit at the intersection of STEM innovation and agile as well as resilient, future ready, infrastructure like solutions that need to be deployed at utility scale, said Karthik Chandrasekar, Co-founder and Managing Partner of Synapses.

Commercialising innovations at this intersection is hard and requires deep sector immersion. We are taking on this challenge because solving for this complexity is what drives alpha and impact, he added.