Nihal Mehta

Who they are

Nihal Mehta is Co-Founder and General Partner at Eniac Ventures — a serial founder who filed for bankruptcy with UrbanGroove, sold ipsh! to Omnicom, and built Eniac into a $500M+ seed fund before starting his seventh or eighth company, Pitch and Run.

Person

Nihal co-founded Eniac Ventures in November 2009 from scratch, focused on mobile technologies, alongside three college friends — at a moment when mobile seed investing in New York was barely a category. He came to it with real scar tissue: dual degrees in Philosophy and Computer Science (and Engineering) from Penn, then a string of companies that ranged from early wins to a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing with UrbanGroove. He built and sold ipsh!, a mobile marketing company, to Omnicom; then founded buzzd, pivoted it into LocalResponse, grew revenues 2,153% over three years, got named to Forbes' Most Promising Companies list, and sold to BlueCava. The through-line is founder-first: he's not an ex-banker or an ex-consultant who moved into VC — every bet he makes is colored by having personally filed for bankruptcy and then clawed back. He hosts the Human Unicorn Pod, a podcast on founders doing their life's work, and writes on LinkedIn about founder mindset, seed investing, and resilience; he also writes at medium.com/@nihalmehta. Outside Eniac, he founded Pitch and Run in 2019 — a NYC community pairing founders and investors over exercise — and co-founded Project Ahimsa in 2001, a nonprofit providing scholarships to disadvantaged youth in India.

How they likely show up

Filed for bankruptcy with UrbanGroove before eventually co-founding a $500M+ fund → treats failure as data, not disqualification; unlikely to be impressed by founders who haven't been tested.
Founded Eniac in 2009 and is still GP in 2026 — a multi-decade commitment to one firm → thinks in fund cycles, not quarters; probably allergic to short-term pivots without conviction.
Role type tagged as 'hybrid' (operator + investor) and publicly describes Eniac as a 'player-coach' model → expects to be hands-on with founders, not a passive check-writer.
Active LinkedIn poster and podcast host (Human Unicorn Pod) on founder mindset and startup resilience → comfortable being visible and opinionated; responds well to direct, substantive engagement rather than pleasantries.
Founded Pitch and Run — a community explicitly built around exercise as connective tissue for founders and investors → values relationship-building through shared experience, not just transactional networking.
Built and exited multiple companies (ipsh! to Omnicom, LocalResponse/buzzd acquired) before switching to VC → has a founder's instinct for product-market fit and revenue traction, not just narrative.

Conversation tips

→ Lead with your founder story and its rough edges — he built a fund on the premise that failure is a feature, not a bug, and will engage more if you've been through something hard.
→ Reference the 'player-coach' framing he uses for Eniac — ask how that actually manifests at the preseed stage; it's a point of pride and he'll have specific examples.
→ If you've listened to an episode of the Human Unicorn Pod or read a specific Eniac blog post, name it — he'll know you did the work, and generic flattery won't land.
→ Don't treat Pitch and Run as a throwaway detail — it's a deliberate community-building bet and signals how he thinks about founder networks; it's worth asking about.

Toolbox

Openers

Open on the UrbanGroove bankruptcy — he's spoken publicly on the Post Money Podcast about going from Chapter 7 to Fund VI, and it's the clearest signal of what shaped his founder-first investing thesis.
Reference Pitch and Run: he founded a community specifically for founders and investors to connect over exercise in 2019, which is an unusual enough distribution channel for a GP that it tells you something about how he builds relationships.
Bring up the ipsh! → Omnicom exit: he sold a mobile marketing company to one of the world's largest holding companies, then turned around and bet on mobile again through Eniac — ask what he saw in mobile then that others missed.

Discovery questions

You've described Eniac as a 'player-coach' fund — what does that actually look like when a preseed founder hits their first real crisis?
LocalResponse grew revenues 2,153% in three years before the exit — what was the hardest operational decision you made in that run that you now use as a reference point when advising portfolio founders?
The Human Unicorn Pod focuses on founders doing their 'life's work' — how do you distinguish that at the preseed stage from a founder who just has conviction but not the right fit?

Avoid

Don't pitch him on a company by leading with market size or TAM slides — he's a former founder who went bankrupt and rebuilt; he'll want to hear about the problem you've personally lived, not the addressable market you've modeled.

Make it yours