Anand joined Lightspeed as a Venture Partner in 2022 and is focused on advising and growing Lightspeed’s crypto portfolio. He’s also Founder and Managing Partner of Canonical Crypto, an early stage crypto infrastructure fund, and previously, was a Visiting Partner at Pear, where he led their blockchain and crypto investments.
In addition to being an investor, Anand is a true builder and operator. Previously, he founded Trusted, a child care marketplace, which was acquired by Care.com in 2018, and subsequently acquired by IAC in 2020. He also cut his teeth building products at companies like Microsoft and Cisco. Anand loves working with entrepreneurs at the earliest stages and helping founders think through product, go-to-market and hiring.
Anand’s journey into the world of crypto started in earnest in 2013 when he first started mining Bitcoin. Understanding Bitcoin and decentralization was his way of exercising some of the distributed systems classes he’d taken back in school. It was not until Ethereum and the notion of “smart contracts” in 2015 that he realized the value of crypto assets as programmable currency. “I spent the majority of my big company career building out and evangelizing the Microsoft Platform to developers, so the idea of programmability on a decentralized platform made immediate sense to me,” said Anand. He and his wife made their first angel investments in the crypto space in 2017.
After Trusted was acquired in 2018, Anand started going deeper down the rabbit hole and his passive obsession with crypto turned into a full-time obsession. After tinkering with building a few DeFi smart contracts, and while teaching a DeFi Masterclass (a cohort based course to help people get deep into the world of DeFi), he realized that the developer platform was there, but the tools and infrastructure to support developers was still in its infancy. And he started to form a thesis to support better developer infrastructure on-chain.
Today, Anand focuses his efforts on supporting founders who are building infrastructure to make web3/crypto developers more productive – everything from developer tools, security infrastructure, identity management, scalability (L2), MEV infrastructure, compute, oracles, communication/messaging infrastructure, data storage and analytics platforms, and more. “I’m passionate about DeFi as one of the most important innovations to happen on-chain,” said Anand. “Moreover, when it comes to crypto and web3, we are at a unique point in time to help builders who will be building the next wave of generational infrastructure. This is what got me interested in Venture Capital.”
While Anand joined Lightspeed in 2022, he’s known several members of the Lightspeed family through both academic and professional endeavors over the last two decades. As he was fundraising for Canonical Crypto, he was reintroduced to the firm and immediately a bond was formed.
Anand has a degree in Computer Engineering from Purdue University. Outside of work, he is usually trying to keep up with his daughter’s chess skills or working to uplevel his dad-joke skills. He also enjoys working out, practicing Transcendental Meditation, and traveling with his wife and daughter.
