Aryan Salil: shaping the future of venture capital at Cambridge

A brief overview of your previous work experience/career path up to this point

Prior to the MFin, I was an Associate in the investment team at Turbostart, an early-stage venture capital fund, investing in technology and deep-tech startups with an AUM of $100 Million. The fund invests across India, the US, Singapore and the Middle East. I worked on sourcing, evaluating, executing investments and managing portfolios from pre-seed to Series A across sectors such as vertical AI, enterprise technology, robotics, deep tech and healthcare. I joined as an Analyst and earned a fast-track promotion to Associate during my tenure.

In this role, I owned significant parts of the investment process, including leading commercial, market, and product diligence through whitespace analysis, market sizing and competitive benchmarking. I worked closely with founders, legal counsels and internal finance teams on term-sheet structuring, covering valuation, governance frameworks and core investor rights.

Previously, I was also one of the founding associates in the India team of Arbolus, a venture backed, tech-driven knowledge PaaS startup headquartered in London. My responsibilities included sales/BD, account management, research, cross-functional product support and internal knowledge initiatives. We were selling our product to some of the best VC and PE clients in the world, and this led to my interest in the space and the pivot to a venture career that followed. Arbolus featured on FT’s top 25 Fastest Growing Companies in Europe for 2023 and raised a big Series B round last year.

Why did you decide to apply to Cambridge, and what attracted you to the MFin programme?

The fascination with Cambridge began early in my childhood when my father bought a Cambridge Dictionary published by the Cambridge University Press. Growing up, Cambridge felt aspirational not only for its academic excellence, but also for the legacy of iconic Indian alumni who I deeply admired, including 2 Prime Ministers in Jawaharlal Nehru and Dr Manmohan Singh, one of the greatest mathematicians of all time in Srinivasa Ramanujan and a Nobel Laureate in Amartya Sen.

The MFin programme, particularly designed for post-experience candidates, felt like the right programme to solidify the academic and technical foundations of my finance knowledge to continue my journey in venture capital. Unlike most Master of Finance programmes that are designed for students straight out of undergraduate degrees, the Cambridge MFin is tailored towards candidates with at least 2 years of industry experience. This creates an elite peer group with strong professional backgrounds, closely mirroring the peer-group dynamics of an elite MBA programme while retaining the academic rigour and structure of a conventional masters degree.

What you are looking forward to the most about your year in Cambridge

I am most looking forward to engaging with Cambridge’s intellectually diverse student community across the wider University. Few institutions offer the opportunity to interact so closely with exceptional students pursuing disciplines as varied as finance, philosophy, literature, classics, law, medicine and mathematics, and I am excited by the perspectives and conversations that emerge from this environment.

What you are hoping to achieve this year, and how it will contribute towards your post-MFin career

Flipping Charles Dickens’s famous line from A Christmas Carol, I see this year as being a year older and becoming many years richer in terms of learnings and experiences. I believe the real value of the Cambridge MFin reveals over the course of a career. As they say in finance, it’s long-term value investing and patient capital.

Your thoughts and feelings on being awarded an MFin scholarship

It’s empowering and encouraging for an international student moving to a new country to study, let alone in one of the oldest and most competitive schools in the world. I am extremely grateful that the admissions committee considered me a deserving recipient of the MFin Programme Scholarship, and also for their consistent support throughout the process.