Investors’ immigration experiences led to DC’s new $56M fintech fund

The cofounders of a new investment firm trace their mission to boost financial resilience throughout the United States to their personal experiences with immigration.   

Tahira Dosani and Vikas Raj are the minds behind Dupont Circle-based ResilienceVC, which launched its first $56 million fund in February. The firm focuses on seed-stage fintech startups to address challenges such as barriers to homeownership or accessing government benefits. 

The pair met at the DC-headquartered Accion Venture Lab in 2013, after experiences building successful financial services ventures in Afghanistan and India. They built a “trusted partnership” there, per Dosani, where they realized a mutual goal to expand financial services access. 

Dosani, who lives in Bloomingdale, immigrated to the US from Pakistan when she was about 10 years old and watched her family grapple with complex financial systems in the US.  

“That certainly shaped in so many ways my desire to work on this issue, and to really commit my career to building financial resilience and stability for poor people,” Dosani told Technical.ly. “I fundamentally believe that financial stability is at the core of economic empowerment, and is what enables people to move out of poverty, what enables people to have better outcomes over time.” 

While ResilienceVC is not immigrant-focused, the topic weighs on the founders’ minds, according to Chevy Chase resident Raj. Immigrants accounted for 14% of the US population in 2021 but made up 24% of those experiencing poverty that same year. Witnessing his own immigrant parents’ journey informed his approach. 

“I think inevitably, the experience of being, even in my case, born here, but the son of immigrants,” Raj told Technical.ly, “impacts the way that I see the opportunity here.”

Dosani and Raj, both adjunct lecturers at Johns Hopkins and other universities, caught up with Technical.ly to discuss their careers in South Asia before starting ResilienceVC, their goals for the firm and raising money for its first fund. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

How did your journey in tech and VC begin?

Vikas Raj: My background has been a mix of corporate finance. I worked as an M&A investment banker [and] worked in the hedge fund world, where I was really able to see how high finance worked — and how it worked for some and it didn’t necessarily work for all. 

My first experience in operating businesses was when I decided to leave my job at a hedge fund to join … a startup microlending business in South India — in Bangalore. 

That business was trying to build the first microlending business focused on urban, low-income women. That company, called Ujjivan, where I was one of the first employees … taught me a couple really important things. 

One was that if you use innovation, specifically technology and business model innovation, you can build a great big unit — profitable and ultimately highly scalable business — while serving the people that everybody else thinks are too expensive, too risky, too small to serve. 

But Ujjivan, using what was not necessarily a digital model — it was an analog model — but it was still a business model [in] innovation — really managed to serve … millions of women. It became a public company trading on the Bombay Stock Exchange. 

It really proved to me that by using business model innovation, you could really scale and serve these customers. 

I eventually went on to help to start and then run for many years, along with Tahira, a fund called Accion Venture Lab. That’s the fund we both ran before we started Resilience. Accion Venture Lab, in some ways, was the next wave of what I did in the microfinance space. 

Venture Lab was focused on using technology, smartphones, feature phones, social media, the internet, to provide financial services to the many billions more individuals around the world that didn’t have proper access. 

Over our eight years at Accion Venture Lab, Tahira and I worked with and invested in 50 companies. A number of them were unicorns. All of them were using technology to ultimately serve people that were underserved. 

The experience of supporting those entrepreneurs — finding them, investing in them quickly and supporting them through multiple stages of fundraising through exit, was the experience that allowed us to build ResilienceVC, which is the third wave of that. 

Tahira, what about you? 

Tahira Dosani: I started my career in management consulting, and for me, that was a great way to get exposure to a lot of businesses, a lot of industries. It let me build a strategic and analytic toolkit that was really useful, but it also left me feeling pretty removed from operations and wanting to get closer to business building. 

My next step was a pretty strong pivot off of the traditional consultant career path, and I ended up, in the early 2000s, moving to Afghanistan and working for the first mobile operator — the first cell phone company, really, that was operating in Afghanistan post-Taliban. 

That, one, helped me really understand what it took to build product and business. But two, got me really interested in that transformative power of technology. In particular, one of the things that I worked really closely on during my time there was launching Afghanistan’s first digital payment solution.  

The country at that time was 97% unbanked. Almost no one had an account. But as we launched cell phone service, we were at a point where the majority of the population now had a cell phone. We saw an opportunity to use that mobile technology to enable payments. We became the second country in the world to launch a mobile money solution. 

That, for me, was incredibly pivotal in seeing the power of technology to be transformative for financial services, and seeing how a digital financial solution could enable people to partake in commerce. To build a whole set of other products and services, because now, it was much easier to charge people. In a world where you don’t [have] bank accounts and credit cards, charging anyone a subscription-type fee becomes virtually impossible. 

So that payments infrastructure allowed so much to be built on it, and that was the moment where I said: It’s this intersection of technology and financial services that is incredibly powerful in enabling people to have better financial outcomes and ultimately better lives. 

From my time in Afghanistan, I then moved on to the investor path. I started in later-stage private equity. But very quickly, I saw the power of venture capital as an investment tool, as an asset class, to work on these types of problems. 

We need not just the same solution that’s serving higher-income folks to be then marketed towards lower-income folks. We need custom-built solutions that are high quality, that are relevant, that are affordable — that are targeted to the needs and experience of that customer. 

[Accion] really laid the foundation … for what we ultimately have built at Resilience. When we think about the opportunity, especially in the US market today — unlike what it is globally, it’s not necessarily one of access. 

For us, this idea of financial resilience, the ability to manage your day-to-day, the ability to build assets for the future, the ability to withstand the shocks and risks that are inevitable is the outcome that we want. 

Discuss how ResilienceVC came to be. How was raising this first fund? 

Raj: I had this idea of a fund built around resilience even while I was at Accion. This idea was the next wave of what work we had been doing in financial inclusion for so many years. 

When it became clear that for me personally, it was time to move on from Accion, I was thinking more and more about this. 

Tahira made a similar decision. We got to talking about this concept, and she was really clearly aligned with it and excited about it. It was a natural act. By the time we were leaving Accion, we were thinking about next steps. It was quite clear that this was going to be a really great opportunity. 

We decided to raise this venture fund starting in late 2022 — not objectively a great time to be trying to raise what was effectively Fund I. But we managed to ultimately be oversubscribed by the end of last year. We had our first close in the middle of ‘23 and then our final close [at the] end of last year. 

Dosani: We both loved the work that we were getting to do at Accion, but I think there was a desire … to get to build something and work on building a platform that could be a demonstration model and a proof point in the market. 

We certainly want to deliver healthier financial returns and transformative outcomes for the users of the companies we’re investing in through what we’re doing at Resilience. 

So getting to build independently and create a platform from the ground up, and one that we could have full ownership and control over, was really important to us in what we want to achieve with this fund and future funds, but also how we want these funds to help shape the ecosystem.

Raj: The hope is that this fund is one of many, and that more broadly, it’s a platform that ultimately becomes the place for entrepreneurs and investors to meet around this goal of building financial stability via innovation and capital.

Why headquarter ResilienceVC in DC? 

Dosani: It was the default, but it also was an intentional choice to stay here and to build here. 

It is an ecosystem with a growing tech startup and investor community, and we have been part of that for 12 years now. We have gotten to help shape and grow that ecosystem, and continue to be a big part of building it and helping it enhance. 

Secondly, in the space that we’re investing in — financial services, which is heavily regulated, and where policy and regulations are shifting constantly — being here in DC, being able to be that conduit and connection between the founders that we’re working with and regulators, policymakers, advisors that are in DC, has been incredibly powerful. 

Raj: Tahira’s right — we live here. But I think if we were starting a fintech fund from scratch, we’d base it here. 

There’s too much going on in our sector around financial services, and innovation coming out of DC right now, to not have your finger on the pulse of how quickly things are changing and then being able to guide your companies appropriately.

Tahira, how has being an immigrant impacted your career in venture capital? 

Dosani: My family moved from Pakistan to the US in the late 80s and moved to Atlanta. That was certainly a big transition. I was just under 10, and it was a very different world. 

Our family struggled to find our financial footing as we came here. It gave me lived experience of what it’s like to move to a new place, to not be included in the formal financial system in that place, to not know how to navigate it, and have your family not know how to navigate it — and to deal with financial instability to some extent.

I saw my own family with that experience — a lack of real financial capabilities and understanding, and more importantly, a lack of access to the right products and services that would tailor to our experience and our needs, and that could help us navigate that journey. Especially when we are talking 30-plus years ago, there [was] very little out there. 

Now we get to see everyday products that are built for immigrants in the US — products that are built for first-generation immigrants or second-generation immigrants, as well as other segments of the market that have been historically underserved because they were either considered too small, too low-income, too hard to reach to be profitable. 

With the types of innovative models that we’re supporting, we’re seeing solutions tailored to segments of the market that have been historically underserved, and that is really powerful. 

Vikas, has being the child of immigrant parents affected or inspired your work? 

Raj: Probably. [laughs]

My parents were born in India. My dad came to the US when he was quite young, in his early 20s. [He] lived in Chicago, went back to India, married my mom, brought her back. She was quite young. By the time I was born in the early 80s, they’d been here for some time, and they were working their way through what it meant to be an American. 

I’ve spent a lot of time in other parts of the world where I’ve seen what real financial instability looks like. 

I’ve learned that even whether you’re in Atlanta or Tulsa or New York, or Manila or Bangalore, a lot of these core challenges are the same. While we live in maybe the most developed country … for those that live on the cusp of poverty, for those that live one car breaking down, or roof caving in away from real financial disaster — the tools are just not there, wherever you live. 

We also live in a country with really liquid capital markets, a lot of early-stage private capital that really could go a long way towards supporting entrepreneurs that are actually focused on this problem. 

We’re not an immigrant-focused fund, but if we’re thinking about financial stability, and a lack of financial stability is particularly pernicious for immigrants. It’s certainly something that’s on our minds.  

What are your next steps for this fund?

Raj: This is a Fund I. We have a team of four in DC. In the short term, we’re really excited about and focused on deploying this capital into great founders, supporting those founders, scaling and ultimately delivering great returns for our investors. 

We will be raising a second fund in the not crazily distant future, probably sometime next year. But really our focus right now is to deploy this fund. 

We do think that the long-term opportunity is one of really building a platform here. Building the place where the best entrepreneurs, best investors come to support innovation for resilience.

But the short-term really looks like running, hopefully, a top-tier venture capital firm that generates great returns for its investors and supports a lot of great founders. 

Dosani: We think there’s tremendous opportunity in this space, and so we’re going to continue building and scaling here. 

We’ll deploy this capital in a set of around 25 founders who are doing things that can be transformative. We will raise more capital and continue to deploy that, but that is still going to be a drop in the bucket when we’re talking about the scale of this challenge. 

We’re really excited to see others come into this space. We’re excited to see more founders building in this space, and more investors that can invest alongside us. We think there’s room for a lot more. We hope that what we’re doing can really help channel much more capital into solving the very real need for financial resilience.

This story, and all of Technical.ly's immigration reporting, is made possible by the WES Mariam Assefa Fund.

The WES Mariam Assefa Fund supports catalytic efforts to create more inclusive economies for immigrants and refugees in the US and Canada. It works closely with organizations and leaders focused on ensuring more equitable access to opportunity and wealth.