Shruti Merchant Hit $1 Million in Revenue Before Raising a Dollar. Now the Pear VC Partner Shows Founders How

When Shruti Merchant started her first company, she had no famous school on her resume, no big-tech job and, in her words, “effectively no network” that could get her in front of top investors. So she built something investors could not ignore: a business that she says was doing more than $1 million in revenue before it raised a single dollar.

A decade later, she is on the other side of the table. Merchant is now a partner at Pear VC, the early-stage firm that backed her second startup, and she has started sharing what she has learned as a founder and an investor on @shrutimerch on TikTok. One of her videos has passed 150,000 views.

Key takeaways

• Merchant co-founded HubHaus, a co-living startup, in early 2016. She says it reached about $1 million in revenue in its first 12 months, before it raised outside money.
• HubHaus raised a $1.4 million first round led by General Catalyst in 2017, then announced $10 million from Social Capital, General Catalyst and angel investors.
• She was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the consumer technology category in late 2017.
• After HubHaus, she worked as a product leader at Stripe and Google and co-founded Sidecar Legal, an AI assistant for small law firms backed by Pear.
• Today she is a partner at Pear VC, works with founders through its PearX program, and posts startup and fundraising advice on TikTok.

Who is Shruti Merchant?

Shruti Merchant is a partner at Pear VC, a seed-stage venture firm with offices in San Francisco and Menlo Park. Pear’s team page says she works “with exceptional founders to help them become world-class CEOs.” She describes herself on TikTok as a “2x founder, ex-Google, ex-Stripe,” and in her videos she calls herself a former founder who “spent a few years as a product exec” at those two companies.

Her path into tech was not a straight line. According to a 2018 Kruze Consulting podcast, she moved to the Bay Area in 2014 after dropping out of medical school. She lives in San Francisco, and her Pear profile notes that her childhood dream was to be an astronaut. Now, she says, she gets to work with founders who “take us to the moon.”

How did Shruti Merchant build HubHaus?

The idea for HubHaus came from her own life. After moving to San Francisco and working long hours, she struggled to meet people, and her experience finding roommates online was what she called “Craigslist roulette.” Large five- to ten-bedroom houses, she noticed, rent for about 30% less per square foot than smaller apartments, but they are hard for a group of strangers to coordinate around.

HubHaus solved that coordination problem. It leased whole homes, furnished them, set up utilities and Wi-Fi, matched housemates, and added community events like monthly dinners and mixers. In 2017, Merchant told TechCrunch that members often joined for the lower rent, but “most end up staying for the connections that they make.”

The early growth was manual. In a TikTok video about the company’s first year, she explains that the team cold-contacted landlords for every large house listed, and that many thought they were “absolutely insane.” The few who said yes became proof for the next ones. After the first five or six houses, she says, things became much easier, and the company reached about $1 million in revenue within 12 months.

How we got to $1m ARR for my first startup

How did HubHaus raise money without a network?

In May 2017, TechCrunch reported that HubHaus had raised $1.4 million in a round led by General Catalyst. In 2018 the company announced a further $10 million from Social Capital, General Catalyst and angel investors, and later reports put its total funding at around $13.4 million.

Merchant credits three things for getting in the door. The first was traction: by the time she pitched, she could point to real revenue. The second was storytelling: rather than pitching a housing product, she pitched a vision of a future where shared living would help solve loneliness. The third was saying yes to every opportunity. In one video, she tells the story of applying for free office space, getting noticed by a General Catalyst investor through a cold message, and then landing a second investor through a lawyer she had met a week later. “Put yourself out there,” she says. “Apply to random things, go to hackathons, cold email people who you think are smarter than you.”

How to raise money when you don’t have a network

What happened to HubHaus?

HubHaus grew to serve thousands of young professionals across the Bay Area, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., according to Pear. In late 2017, American Bazaar reported that Merchant had been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in consumer technology for her work on the company.

Co-living became a hard sector to fund after WeWork’s failed IPO in 2019, and Merchant has pointed to that fallout as a reason fundraising got tougher. She stepped down as CEO in early 2020, and in September 2020 Inman reported that HubHaus was shutting down after struggling to raise more capital. Many of the lessons in her videos trace back to that experience, from how much the choice of market matters to knowing when venture capital is, and is not, the right fit.

What is Sidecar Legal?

Merchant’s second company is Sidecar Legal. According to South Park Commons, she co-founded it with software engineer Jonathan Tippens to build an AI assistant for small law firms, designed to help them bring in more clients, cases and revenue. Pear backed the company, and Merchant later joined the firm as a partner.

That second founding experience shapes how she invests. In her videos she argues that the biggest opportunity in AI right now is what she calls AI-native services: instead of selling software to a business, you sell the finished outcome. “Don’t build a software company,” she says. “Build a software company that is masquerading as a services firm.” That video is her most-watched to date.

If you want to build a trillion dollar company, do this

What does Shruti Merchant look for in founders?

A few weeks into her job at Pear, Merchant said she had met with more than 100 founders in a single week. She sums up what she looks for in three signals:

• Clarity of thought. Founders who can explain both their short-term wedge and their long-term vision, which also signals they can raise money and recruit.
• Progress. Fast movement from zero to real revenue, even if the first idea is not the final one.
• Background. Relevant experience, such as having started a venture-backed company before or built machine learning systems at a top company.

She also warns founders to make sure they actually want venture capital. Because VCs make most of their money from the top few percent of their portfolio, she explains, a venture-backed company has to aim for an outsized outcome, and she is openly a fan of bootstrapped businesses that do not.

What can founders learn from her pitch deck breakdowns?

Some of Merchant’s most popular videos walk through the early pitch decks of companies that became giants, slide by slide. Her breakdown of the deck ElevenLabs used when it was still an automatic dubbing startup has more than 50,000 views. She points out how the deck moves from problem to solution, shows technical depth and team credentials, then sizes the market from a narrow starting wedge (content creators) up to a much larger industry.

Pitch deck from a company that started in 2022, now valued at $11B

She has done similar teardowns of other well-known decks, plus videos on what it takes to close a $1 million, $5 million or $10 million round, the “Series A crunch,” and the most common mistake she sees in pitch decks.

How can founders work with Shruti Merchant at Pear?

Merchant works with founders through PearX, Pear’s selective accelerator program. In an August 2026 video, she said the program invests between $250,000 and $2 million in each company and that about 80% of companies in the program go on to raise an institutional round. She credits that partly to the team: all of the PearX partners, including her, are former founders.

She is one of a growing group of founders and investors we have profiled who teach in public, alongside Esther Crawford, Sydney Singh and Areen. What sets Merchant apart is that she has lived every stage she talks about: a bootstrapped first year, a venture-backed scale-up, a shutdown, big-tech product work, a second startup, and now the investor’s chair.

Frequently asked questions

Who is Shruti Merchant?

Shruti Merchant is a two-time founder and a partner at Pear VC in San Francisco. She co-founded the co-living startup HubHaus and the AI legal startup Sidecar Legal, was named to Forbes 30 Under 30, and worked as a product leader at Stripe and Google.

What company did Shruti Merchant found?

She co-founded HubHaus in 2016, a co-living startup that leased large homes and filled them with young professionals. She later co-founded Sidecar Legal, an AI assistant for small law firms.

How much did HubHaus raise?

HubHaus raised a $1.4 million first round led by General Catalyst in 2017 and later announced $10 million from Social Capital, General Catalyst and angel investors. Reports put its total funding at about $13.4 million.

Why did HubHaus shut down?

HubHaus shut down in 2020 after struggling to raise more capital. Merchant has said the fallout from WeWork’s failed IPO made fundraising harder for co-living companies. She had stepped down as CEO earlier that year.

What does Shruti Merchant do at Pear VC?

She is a partner at Pear VC, a seed-stage venture firm, where she works with early-stage founders, including through the PearX accelerator program.

Where can I follow Shruti Merchant?

She posts startup, fundraising and pitch deck advice on TikTok at @shrutimerch and is also on Instagram.

This profile is based on Shruti Merchant’s public TikTok videos, her Pear VC profile and published news reports. Revenue figures for HubHaus are as she has described them. Booked Impact did not interview her, and she did not review this article before publication.