Rahul Gupta

I’m the founder and general partner of Fervor Capital, an early-stage firm I started after years of angel investing. Fervor backs AI-first companies — where AI is the architecture, not a feature — in the regulated, complex industries that run the real economy. Responsible AI and ESG run quietly through everything we back.

I’m also the founding investor of AI First Fund, where I’m designing a retail-accessible AI-first interval fund — still in development. And I’m a founding board member of two research initiatives, RAIESG and Economics & AI for Earth, which work on responsible AI governance and climate economics.

On the operator side, I’m in corporate strategy and strategic partnerships at Verizon, where my work runs on applied AI — from build-vs-buy-vs-partner decisions to how AI actually gets deployed at enterprise scale. My background in product and AI/ML spans Verizon, Oracle, Cigna, AT&T, T-Mobile, and TIAA, and earlier I founded Twilixbell, an early-stage fintech focused on SMB lending. I studied at Harvard Business School (Executive Education, PLD) and hold an MS in Computer Science from UNC Charlotte.

How I think about this →