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AI Private Equity Associates

Zarna is private equity’s first AI associate class. Our agents plug directly into your firm’s data and work like a deal team that never sleeps. Zarna’s agents analyze CIMs, build LBOs, update CRMs, draft IC memos, & act based on decades of proprietary firm knowledge. The result: investors spend less time buried in decks and spreadsheets, and more time on judgment, relationships, and winning deals.
Active Founders
Vivan Agrawal
Vivan Agrawal
Founder
Building Zarna AI
Rishabh Dhariwal
Rishabh Dhariwal
Founder
CEO/Co-Founder @ Zarna AI
Hrishi Joshi
Hrishi Joshi
Founder
Co-Founder @ Zarna AI
Rakesh Mehta
Rakesh Mehta
Founder
Building Zarna—the Agentic Operating Layer for Private Capital Markets. Focused on AI/ML applications to the real world. Other interests include astrophysics, videography/film, photography, and basketball.
Company Launches
Zarna - AI Associates for Private Equity
See original launch post

Hey everyone 👋

We’re Rishabh, Hrishi, Vivan, and Rakesh.
We’re building AI associates that automate deal work for private equity firms.
(demo video)


Problem

Deal teams spend a surprisingly large amount of their time on repetitive processes:
reviewing CIMs, rebuilding models, creating tear sheets and IC decks, updating CRMs and trackers, and piecing together context fragmented across file drives.

What We Do

Zarna connects our cohort of AI associates to the firm’s history. Past deals, the CRM, shared drives, board decks, third-party databases, etc.

Once connected, they execute core work end-to-end:

  • Generate tear sheets, IOI materials, and IC drafts in the firm’s format
  • Convert CIM financials into diligence model structures
  • Complete all data entry & enrichment into CRMs
  • Sync operator notes & portfolio KPI trackers over time
  • Analyze CIMs, teasers, and market reports to surface what matters

The goal is simple:

With the summaries, models, and trackers handled, investors can spend their time forming deeper views on companies and markets — building conviction faster on the right deals.


Why Zarna

Every PE firm has its own way of evaluating businesses, management, and risk.
So generic copilots fail — they don’t understand the firm’s history, style, or decision patterns.

The hard part is institutional memory and reasoning, not text generation.

We embed forward-deployed engineers with deal teams to tune how the agents:

  • interpret financial signals
  • format materials
  • map market structures
  • reflect the firm’s voice and conviction process

This turns what used to live in individuals who could walk out the door into something searchable, reusable, and cumulative across the firm.

The result is not just “faster work.”
It is firms that start each deal loaded with context instead of from zero.


Backstory

Pre-YC, we were forward-deployed engineers embedded in a $20B private equity firm, leading AI enablement initiatives & building agents automation across sourcing, diligence, and portfolio management.

The four of us are best friends who have been building together since college. We studied computer science, electrical engineering, & economics at UC Berkeley. We’ve explored many ideas over the last 3 years — this is the one where we saw the problem first-hand and couldn’t let go of it.


Who is Zarna for

We are focused on building for Private Equity, Growth Equity, Private Credit, Family Offices, & Investment Banking. Book a demo today at zarnaai.com.

Questions

Reach out to rishabh@zarnaai.com (630-631-9264), hrishi@zarnaai.com (603-233-4478), rakesh@zarnaai.com (510-458-6129), vivan@zarnaai.com (510-6849147)

Zarna
Founded:2025
Batch:Fall 2025
Team Size:4
Status:
Active
Location:San Francisco
Primary Partner:Pete Koomen