Key Venture: Screening 2,000 Startups to a Shortlist of 40

At Key Venture, Shubham was responsible for filtering a high-volume deal pipeline of over 2,000 early- and growth-stage startups across technology, consumer, and industrial sectors. The firm received inbound pitches by email and sourced additional companies at startup events, including IIT summits and TiE Global.

His screening process ran in two stages. In the first pass, he read pitch decks and assessed whether the product addressed a real industry trend, whether the technology was differentiated, and whether the founding team had a credible track record. Companies that were too early-stage or whose founders lacked relevant background were filtered out at this stage.

Forty companies made it to the second stage, where Shubham got on calls with founders to understand the business model in depth and assess how the founder thought about scaling.

One company he dug into was Mojo, a SaaS platform for logistics operators. What distinguished Mojo was not just the fleet management functionality that other platforms offered, but its driver-layer monitoring: real-time tracking of driver fatigue and behavior, which addressed a risk that logistics companies typically managed reactively and at significant cost. The combination of operational visibility and driver safety under one platform gave Mojo a differentiated value proposition that Shubham assessed as genuinely defensible.

He also identified Captain Fresh at this stage, a company he would later recommend for investment at Veer Growth Fund.