Making a deep impact, especially at a developmental level, is extremely important for Tanya Rohatgi in everything she pursues. Working with startups as part of the Lightbox investment team, she derives a “visceral satisfaction” from seeing something grow in front of her eyes and seeing that product or service touch people around her as consumers. In her work, she strives to find a balance between autonomy and adaptability, a principle she imbibed from a former manager, as she navigates the world of venture capital.

Tanya is an alumnus of Ashoka University, where she pursued political science and international relations, including a brief stint studying development economics and data analysis at Harvard University. After completing foreign policy internships at Brookings and Carnegie, joined The Convergence Foundation as a founding member of a think-tank that aimed to address the lack of engagement and collaboration between practitioners, academics, and policymakers in India, China and Southeast Asia. She subsequently rolled up the think-tank into an edtech venture to bring development insights to policymakers and universities. Two years into this endeavour, Tanya knew she’d caught the builder bug and transitioned out of the development sector and into the startup space, joining Camp K12 to lead growth for their new venture – an AR/VR coding platform for kids called HatchXR. 

Post Camp K12, she had two big realisations – she missed working on development and loved working at a startup. Impact entrepreneurship, she knew, was in her not-so-distant future. But, before taking that plunge she decided to acquire horizontal exposure to startups with a sector-agnostic venture capital firm that was high on operational involvement. Her search, no surprise, led her to Lightbox.

As part of the Lightbox investment team, Tanya is entrusted with sourcing and dealflow, portfolio engagement, sector evaluation and contributing to building investment theses. When evaluating a startup her priorities are whether there is a strong wedge for a large market and founders who have a keen understanding of who their consumer is (or isn’t). She is interested in most things consumer health and distribution-first brands building for Tier 2 India and beyond.

Tanya’s interests outside of startups and investing include sustainable urban development and mental health advocacy. She also has a passion for travel and hopes to climb one of the seven summits soon. For fun she binges on true crime documentaries and works hard to convince the world that brewing the perfect cup of tea is a life skill.