Shobhit Gupta, senior associate at GM Ventures, is one of our top 50 Rising Stars in corporate venturing for 2025.
Shobhit Gupta joined General Motors as an intern in the treasury department while pursuing his MBA. He later accepted a full-time role in the department, after completing an independent study course at a private equity firm, which piqued his interest in investments within finance.
The deep analyses and discussions he undertook in the treasury department, paired with his background in private equity, inspired him to look for opportunities within the organisation’s investments ecosystem. He has now been with GM Ventures for three years.
In that time, Gupta made a point of following advice he received from a director at GM treasury – spend at least an hour a week networking. Within the VC ecosystem, you naturally talk to founders, bankers, advisors and VC firms, but leveraging your relationships within the parent company is also key to success, says Gupta.
“Understand the business unit’s needs and how to translate that into actionable steps and find an opportunity that can help address visionary goals”
A focus of Gupta’s role as a strategic investor includes “understanding the business unit’s needs and how to translate that into actionable steps and finding an opportunity that can help address visionary goals.”
He is following developments in hardware and software in the energy sector. As AI and data centres put a lot of demand on grids, there are gains to be made within power generation and transmission to mitigate efficiency losses.
With a background as a structural engineer, Gupta is also keeping track of developments that can accelerate highly iterative engineering procedures. “If computational engineering can be sped up and reduce the number of iterations you have to do to reach the end goal, that has a lot of potential to move the needle, for manpower to be spent on new design ideas and new criteria.”
Founded in 2010, GM Ventures’ team now numbers 15. The fund has made 79 investments to date and has 41 portfolio companies. Investment focus areas are in line with GM’s goal of zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion.
See the full list of Rising Stars 2025 here.
