By Betsy Vereckey

Three years after graduating from Tuck, Sheena Jindal T’19 closed a $32M venture fund in one of the hardest fundraising environments in a decade.

“It was kind of crazy,” she said. “That’s probably not the norm coming out of business school.” 

Before launching Sugar Free Capital, she’d been working in venture and became the youngest partner in Comcast Ventures’ history. But she couldn’t reconcile what she was seeing: sky-high valuations, capital deployed without discipline, and deals that didn’t survive basic unit economics scrutiny. It was 2021. Everything was sugar.

“I always joked that if I launched my own fund, I would name it Sugar Free Capital, as the antidote to the age of excess,” she said. 

Tuck professor Jim Feuille served as a trusted confidant who helped her think through the mechanics of executing upon this vision. “He was one of the first people I told when I was thinking about launching the fund, and he never told me that I was too young or that it was too early in my career to do it,” she said. “I have eternal gratitude for his confidence.” 

A Boston native, Jindal graduated early from MIT, surrounded by peers who were not only wildly ambitious but genuinely among the sharpest people on the planet. “That’s really where I became inspired to be in venture capital,” she said. “All around me, people wanted to build the impossible.” 

After MIT, she joined The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and gained experience with early-stage startups before arriving at Tuck, drawn to the close-knit cohort and the depth of relationships. At Tuck, she locked in on the venture space, securing a coveted internship at Bessemer Venture Partners and seeing firsthand what a blue-chip venture firm’s investing process actually looked like from the inside. 

She recalled taking a consequential course taught by former professor Peter Fisher which left a lasting imprint. It reframed risk, not as something to avoid, but as something to architect around. 

“Venture is an asset class that rewards risk taking and clarity of thought,” she said. “His class taught me how to structure your life so you can make four or five genuinely smart decisions a year. That’s what we do at Sugar Free Capital.” 

In 2025, Sugar Free closed its inaugural fund, $32M to back 15 early-stage companies, with a deliberate concentration in technical founders, many of them from MIT. One portfolio company, Deepnight, is building AI-powered night vision for defense applications. 

“I get to live in the future every day and talk to people that are thinking about what the world's going to look like five or ten years from now and be part of that journey,” she said. 

Her advice to budding entrepreneurs is to be ambitious and surround yourself with the best people in your industry. 

“I think Limited Partners want to invest in people that are energetic, incisive and ambitious, and there’s a narrow window of time in your life when you’re all three of those things,” she said. “When you want to start your own firm, you can't delay by over-indexing on strategy. You just have to get started and start doing.” 

This story originally appeared in print in the Summer 2026 issue of Tuck Today magazine.