Introducing the 2026 Also Capital Summer Scouts
Round three!
Hard to believe we’re already heading into the third year of the Also Capital Summer Scout Program. The 2024 and 2025 teams were a huge success, and at this point the program is one of my favorite parts of running this firm, something I look forward to every year. The alumni network is also really starting to come into its own.
A quick refresher on how it works: The scout team spends the summer in person with us at our SoHo office, running their own pool of capital like a fund. They have full autonomy over deal sourcing, diligence, pipeline management, portfolio construction, investment committee presentations, and “LP” reporting. All of the carry on the pool goes to the team. Along the way, they also pitch in on a few special projects for the core Also Capital fund and our portfolio companies.
In what’s become kind of a new tradition, we have a scout from the summer prior returning as Managing Partner of this year’s team. We couldn’t be more excited to have Esha back, and to add some new faces to the mix. Without further ado, here are the 2026 partners. As always, reach out to them directly to say hello or chat about what you’re building.
Esha Cyril, Managing Partner
Raised by two founders, her mom in fashion and dad in tech, Esha Cyril grew up on a healthy dose of delusion and the instinct that the hardest problems reward people who think across disciplines. She came to Johns Hopkins as a premed but quickly learned her generalist wiring wasn’t something to narrow to solve the problems she cared about most.
About to graduate with degrees in public health and economics, Esha has spent years researching rare disease drug development, previously authoring and proposing California’s now-passed hepatitis screening bill, and now building an AI tool for n-of-1 trials, a bespoke but slow process usually run by parents of children with rare diseases. Her work alongside founders spans clinical trials at a Series B immuno-oncology company, GTM at an early-stage AI startup tackling substance abuse, and sourcing deals at Soma Capital. Through college, she has mentored over 50 lab spinouts and companies from Parkinson’s therapies to low-wind-speed energy capture. As a scout at Also Capital last summer, she had the chance to learn fast about a lot, from what hiring great early talent looks like to the hands-on work of building conviction, whether on the future of railroads or biotech supply chains. While the sheer learning velocity was great, the people were better, and she’s thrilled to be back investing in outlier founders alongside them.
Outside of this, she believes in always keeping the mind and body moving. She’s a philosophy lover and has recently been working on maternal care and, relatedly, solar-powered water system projects for the mountainous regions of Bangladesh. She has also played racquetball for a decade, representing Team USA with 15 national medals and four international titles, now training for the U.S. Open with her doubles partner (and twin sister).
Rushil Kukreja, Partner
Rushil is an incoming Physics student at Princeton University with a deep passion for space technology, building systems for extreme environments and defense applications. While only in high school, that drive has pushed him to research with an MIT AeroAstro professor to prototype autonomous satellites, launch a payload 400,000 feet into space from NASA Wallops Flight Facility, lead the world’s first HS team building a liquid-fuel rocket, and even work on Lockheed Martin’s THAAD missile defense system. Along the way, he also won a Gold Medal in the USA Astronomy and Astrophysics Olympiad and spoke at the United Nations, drawn by the same desire to understand the universe he’s trying to build for.
His path into startups came through a different kind of extreme environment: disaster zones. After watching how chaotic and slow search-and-rescue could be, he built WiFind, an aerial device that uses Wi-Fi signal analysis to locate survivors trapped under rubble. After winning 1st Place internationally in the Conrad Challenge, WiFind earned $45,000+ in grant funding and landed him at the Founders, Inc. accelerator in San Francisco. Building WiFind under real constraints, with the first prototype hacked together from a salvaged home router, gave him a visceral sense of what it actually takes to push something difficult into existence.
In his free time, Rushil writes poetry, which turns out to be more compatible with physics than most people expect (turns out even Schrödinger wrote poems!). At Also Capital, Rushil hopes to source and back the outlier founders operating in the same territory he’s drawn to: too deep or too early in the frontier for most to even take seriously yet.
Trevor Xing-Xie, Partner
After years of volunteering in his local neurodivergent community, Trevor first ventured into the lab to build neuromodulation devices for locomotor dysfunction. Recruited to write infrastructure software at Google after his first year at Vanderbilt, Trevor now brings seriously intense grit and tact to all affairs; while the nervous system remains a raison d’etre, he’s since extended into affective computing, energy landscapes, intrinsically disordered proteins, and naturally, deep brain stimulation.
A Computer Science and Neuroscience student, he believes computation should celebrate the complexity of being human, using technology to shift our Overton window instead of medicating those who don’t conform.
Trevor has worked with startups across noninvasive cognitive load quantification and emotionally expressive robots, and brings a rigorously technical lens to pricing meaningful ideas. Outside of startups and science, Trevor is a marathon runner, lackluster ex-athlete, and enjoyer of Calvin and Hobbes, The Kekulé Problem, and Adlerian Psychology (courtesy of Mike).