Shankar Bhargava

Shankar Bhargava is a Partner at FirstHand Alliance, an early-stage venture capital firm based in New York City. Founded in 2022, the firm writes initial checks ranging from $100,000 to $5 million for B2B startups developing autonomous agentic AI solutions. Bhargava recently participated in several notable transactions, including a $500,000 seed round for Artifact and a $30 million Series A financing for healthcare AI platform Freed in March 2025. His professional background and the firm's foundation are closely tied to former executives and founders associated with Salesforce acquisitions. Through his investment activities, he frequently co-invests alongside prominent venture capital funds such as Sequoia Capital to support emerging technology companies. Bhargava currently focuses his efforts on identifying and funding founders who are building next-generation machine learning applications across the enterprise software, fintech, and healthcare sectors.