At a time when India’s startup ecosystem is rapidly maturing, conversations around diversity in venture capital and angel investing are finally beginning to move from tokenism to tangible action. Yet, despite the momentum, women remain significantly underrepresented in the rooms where investment decisions are made.
In an insightful conversation with investor and founder, Aishwarya Malhi felt less like a conventional interview and more like a timely reflection on the future of India’s investment ecosystem where it stands today, the gaps that still persist, and what it will take to build a more inclusive generation of capital allocators.
Aishwarya has spent the last seven years building meaningful access for over 200 founders and has built a community of funders that’s 60% women. She has moved $50M in deployed and follow-on capital towards founders. This isn’t just about representation, it’s about meaningful access – to capital, to networks, to the kind of early belief that changes trajectories.
In 2019, Aishwarya Malhi and Vikas Kumar launched Rebalance, one of India’s earliest accelerator programs for female founders and India’s first angel community on a mission to see more women invest. What stood out throughout our conversation was not only her clarity around investing or her vision, but also the deeply personal journey that played a critical role in shaping her worldview.
“I didn’t really have a conventional childhood. I’ve always been self-managing, more curious than scared, and honestly that’s probably what pushed me toward startups in the first place.”
Aishwarya began by sharing her unconventional upbringing, one that stretched across China, Hong Kong, and India. Having spent her early childhood in Shenzhen and Hong Kong before moving to India in 2002. She recalled traveling alone across immigration borders daily to attend her school in Hong Kong while living in Shenzhen, at the age of seven.
“I think that early independence shaped me a lot,” she said during the conversation. “I grew up operating from a place of no fear, just curiosity.”
Raised away from her parents from the age of eight, she credits much of her emotional resilience and perspective to the women in her life – her grandmother, aunt, and extended family who helped raise her while she was in India. That sense of resilience later became foundational to her entrepreneurial and investing journey.
After completing her undergrad in 2016, Aishwarya joined an early-stage machine learning startup in Singapore. There, she experienced firsthand what building a startup from zero to one truly means from fundraising and hiring to product building and marketing.
“I realized very early that large organizations were not my place,” she explained. “I wanted to contribute meaningfully and move fast.”
She was just 24, when she co-founded Rebalance: 30 Investments to date, 75% female founders
Headquartered in Gurugram, Rebalance emerged from a simple but powerful observation: while raising the first cheque is difficult for any founder, it is often much harder for women. She launched Rebalance at 24, making her one of the youngest female founders of an accelerator and angel community.
“We realized the real problem was access,” Aishwarya explained. “Good investing is not gendered. Access is.”
Rebalance’s thesis isn’t about chasing sectors or riding a single market wave – it’s about backing ambition early, because great founders can come from anywhere and create enduring businesses that stand the test of time.
At a time when India lacked globally benchmarked accelerators and incubators, Aishwarya mentioned “many founders we spoke to during our early days were uncertain of the value add or had disappointing experiences with accelerators in India,” highlighting why it was even more important to build a program that delivered real momentum.
“Founders don’t just join an accelerator for the capital, but also for the access to the community and what that can unlock for them,” she further added.
Today, Rebalance has hosted 10 accelerator cohorts, backed more than 30 startups, with nearly 75% of the portfolio comprising companies with women founders or co-founders. According to Aishwarya, nearly 70% of those investments were led by Rebalance.
“What founders need most at the earliest stage is someone willing to believe in them,” she said. “We wanted to be that first believer.”
Why It’s Rare To Spot Women Who Angel Invest
One of the strongest themes throughout the interview was Aishwarya’s candid perspective on why women’s participation in investing remains low despite growing conversations around inclusion.
Her answer was direct.
“Women are taught to save, not to invest.”
She explained that the issue goes far deeper than education alone. According to her, even highly educated women are often not encouraged to actively make financial decisions or build investment conviction independently.
“Historically, women were rarely given the agency to make investment decisions,” she noted. “And when you’re never trusted with those decisions, you also begin doubting your own ability to make them.”
For Aishwarya, the solution lies not in symbolic inclusion campaigns, but in building communities and exposure pathways where women can actively observe, evaluate, and participate in deal-making.
“Education helps. But proximity helps more,” she said.
Interestingly, she also pointed out that women investors often approach investments differently from men not emotionally, but structurally. There’s additionally a confidence gap – many women feel they need to know everything before investing, while many men start learning by investing.
“Women tend to ask more questions around risk mitigation and execution before anything else,” she explained. “Men often index first on scale and opportunity size. The best investors combine both mindsets.”
India’s Angel Ecosystem Is Evolving
Reflecting on the evolution of India’s startup and angel ecosystem over the last seven years, Aishwarya believes the market has become significantly more mature and thesis-driven.
“The ecosystem earlier was heavily copy-pasting western models,” she observed. “Today, founders are solving uniquely Indian problems.”
She highlighted how growing startup exits, IPOs, and ESOP liquidity events have helped build confidence around startup investing as an asset class. One major shift she has observed is the rise of operators, product managers, and startup professionals becoming active angel investors themselves.
“These are people who deeply understand how startups function,” she explained. “Their capital comes with operational insight.”
She also pointed to the increasing emergence of women-led funds and family offices directly participating in startup investments, something she says was extremely rare when Rebalance first started.
Betting on Deeptech and India’s Global Innovation Story
While Rebalance remains sector-agnostic, Aishwarya admitted that they’ve backed some incredible India-first innovations much before the deeptech wave took over. Nearly 40% of the portfolio sector mix today falls under deeptech. In fact, 90% of these are led by women.
The firm is bullish on hardware, industrial tech, climate resilience infrastructure, health, AI-native companies and consumer brands with global cultural relevance.
“We want to back companies that can build globally relevant technology from India,” she said.
“There’s a difference between innovation and invention,” she explained. “Real inventions are hard to come by but India has a massive opportunity to participate in the global industrial and tech evolution”.
She shared examples of startups in Rebalance’s portfolio ranging from green hydrogen aviation engines, transonic drones, super alloys to women’s health, brain connectomics, consumer brands and quantum security.
What Aishwarya Looks for in Founders
Aishwarya also writes personal cheques, once in a while. When asked what qualities she prioritizes most while evaluating founders, Aishwarya’s answer was remarkably founder-centric rather than numbers-driven.
For her, three qualities matter most:
- Clarity of thought
- Humility and openness to feedback
- The ability to attract exceptional talent
“Resilience is everything in the startup journey,” she emphasized. “Everything else comes after that. At the seed stage, you’re underwriting a founder’s ability to learn faster than the market changes.”
She also offered sharp observations about what many founders get wrong while pitching investors.
“A pitch deck is not a data dump,” she said. “It’s a clarity test.”
According to her, most early-stage founders overwhelm investors with market sizing slides and buzzwords instead of focusing on storytelling, insights, and conviction.
“Investors don’t remember your CAGR percentages,” she laughed. “They remember whether you made them feel excited about the problem you’re solving.”
One of India’s Youngest Independent Directors
Beyond Rebalance, Aishwarya recently became one of India’s youngest independent directors at the age of 30, a unique opportunity she never initially planned for.
“I honestly thought I was too young for the room when the opportunity came by” she said candidly.
However, the experience has given her a very different perspective on governance, scale, and boardroom decision-making lessons that now influence how she evaluates startups as well.
“It helps me understand what companies need at scale,” she explained. “You start seeing the importance of governance structures much earlier.”
“Money Makes Money”
Perhaps one of the most memorable moments of the conversation came when Aishwarya reflected on how we think about wealth creation and impact.
“Money makes money,” she said.
She emphasized that wealth creation rarely happens unless you have money in the first place and never through savings alone, but through long-term investing conviction. Yet, she was equally careful to remind aspiring investors that angel investing is a high-risk asset class and should only be explored after understanding other forms of investing first.
For women especially, her advice was practical and grounded:
“Start small and build conviction gradually. Build a portfolio – two or three companies rarely show returns.”
Rather than chasing expensive investment courses, she encouraged aspiring angel investors to begin by observing deal flow, attending demo days, joining syndicates, and learning through real participation.
“Your first two investments are your fees for learning,” she said.
A Larger Shift Is Finally Beginning
As our conversation came to a close, one thing became increasingly clear: Aishwarya Malhi is not simply building an accelerator or angel community. She is actively trying to reshape who gets access to capital, who gets to write cheques, and who gets visibility inside India’s startup ecosystem.
And perhaps that is why her story feels so important today.
While India’s startup ecosystem has successfully built unicorns, IPOs, and billion-dollar narratives, the next phase of growth may depend equally on what the next generation of capital allocators look like.
The problem is not a lack of capable women investors. It’s that investing has historically been relationship-driven and access-gated. Rebalance is trying to change who gets invited into the room.
Interview By : Vanshika Tayal
