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 regulated, complex industries that run the real economy — financial services, healthcare, and critical infrastructure. 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 nonprofits, the RAIESG Foundation and Economics & AI for Earth, which work on responsible AI governance and climate economics research.

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 →