Manan is a founding partner of Unshackled Ventures. Prior to Unshackled Ventures, Manan ran marketing for ed-tech startup Kno that raised over $90M of funding from top VCs including a16z, First Round Capital, and Floodgate. The company was acquired by Intel in 2013. Before Kno, Manan was an investment banker at the Royal Bank of Canada, with his most notable deal being the $1.9B acquisition of Skype led by Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz in 2009 — later sold to Microsoft for $8.5B. Manan received his B.S. in Material Science and Engineering and B.A. in Economics from UCLA in 2007. He also studied Entrepreneurship and Marketing at the London School of Economics. Beyond academics at UCLA, Manan was also the captain and lead of a national championship-winning dance team. Manan has been invited by the White House and the U.S. State Department to speak at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit.

We invest as early as feasibly possible in immigrant-led companies. This typically means pre-seed investments, with a generalist approach to industry and vertical, but a playbook on how to raise your next round.

Career Karma, Digital Brain, Dispo, Lily AI, Lynk, Oxio, Pine Park Health, Plutoshift, Pod Foods

We respond to every inbound pitch request, warm or cold. We aren't afraid to lead. For every $1M we have invested, our teams have gone on to raise $27M more.