The VCs betting founders need a village, not a blank check

Raj and Sunny Singh Sandhu trace their origins to a 50-person Punjabi village. “We come from this multigenerational family of Indian Army and Air Force,” said Raj. “Everyone served, on one side. And then, everyone’s been farmers, in agriculture. So, when we go back it’s acres and acres of ancestral land our family’s held for generations.” The brothers—now respectively 31 and 27—have spent most (or, in Sunny’s case, all) of their lives in the U.S. But those origins have remained influential: As the two of them looked at starting their own VC firm, Raj and Sunny believed they could compete in a viscerally competitive landscape by drawing on where they came from. There are, after all, many kinds of villages. “There’s the actual village where our family comes from, of course,” said Sunny. “But there’s also a metaphorical village we like to point to, that’s beyond a physical community.” Raj and Sunny started New York and San Francisco-based Vicus Ventures—the name taken from the Latin word for village— in 2024. At the time, Sunny had previously worked as a consultant at Bain, while Raj had spent three years working on wearables and AI at Alphabet’s Verily. They’ve been investing as they go for the last couple of years, backing companies like Avoca, Specter, Pallet, and Yuzu Health. Now, Vicus has closed its debut fund at $55 million, a frankly contrarian number in a mega-fund world (and even for an emerging manager). Sunny and Raj told Fortune they turned down “way more” capital. “Founders are getting younger than ever, getting more term sheets and blank checks thrown at them than ever,” said Raj. “So, what do they really need? It’s not capital anymore that’s differentiated. Whether we’re deploying 55 or 155, that won’t move the needle in us getting the best deals. It’s us coming in and saying: ‘We’re going to deliver minimum dilution, maximum impact.’ Our LPs can then see our returns because we’re the right-sized fund where we can actually do that.” There was symb