Indian American Sheel Tyle to lead $100 million startup fund

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NEW YORK – Indian American Sheel Tyle, 26, founded a new company in May called Amplo and will now lead a $100 million fund for seed and follow-on deals related to startup Andela.

According to a Forbes report, Amplo was able to join a who’s who cast of venture firms in backing Andela – African fund CRE Venture Capital led the round in the largest ever between an African firm and startup, joining Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, GV, Salesforce Ventures and Spark Capital and has completed a first close in recent weeks as well as being oversubscribed.

Tyle served as an independent board member at Andela since 2014, upon the request of CEO Jeremy Johnson.

Tyle is joined by a new independent board member, former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who has her own ties to Amplo.

After graduating from Stanford at age 19 with a double major in biology and public policy, Tyle went to Harvard Law School while he worked for the venture firm Bessemer Venture Partners and then the NEA where he started off as an associate but was quickly promoted to principal and co-headed the firm’s seed practice.

On his LinkedIn profile Tyle writes that all along, he was investing alongside his employers, making personal bets on Pinterest; the French online ad firm Criteo; the Canadian e-commerce software company Shopify and Twilio, which enables developers to build applications that can interact with customers.

Tyle also invested personally in those companies, Andela and Mark43, appearing on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2012.

Although Tyle did not discuss the financial details of the fund due to regulations, he told Forbes that Amplo’s goal is to concentrate on young entrepreneurs who can solve “real problems.”

“Founders who want to change something about how the world works tend to build bigger companies,” he said.