Chennai/Bangalore, April 10th, 2017/Team Estrade//– Ventureast, one of India’s longest standing early-stage Venture Capital firms, has appointed Dr. Srikanth Sundararajan as Partner to oversee investments of its recently launched Ventureast Proactive Fund II (VPFII). He brings with him 25+ years of innovative IT and entrepreneurial experience with a host of leading technology firms in India and the US. Until recently, Srikanth was a Venture Partner with Helion Venture Partners, and helped with their Fund 3 portfolio. He was involved with companies such as BigBasket, ID Fresh, Rapid Value, Whatfix, PipeMonk, CubeIT, MOEngage, CrownIT, Seclore, and others.
Srikanth is also an active angel investor/mentor- companies he has backed include HyperVerge, DocsApp, Nexgen PMS, Innovaccer, Airwood, AtherEnergy, Affine Analytics, EnterpriseForce, Wowsome, Minjar, Fleximoney, Active.ai, 34th Cross, among others. He was also a part of the Google Launch Pad set of mentors, some notables that came out of here were Baby Chakra, Adwyze, & English Dost. He has also actively collaborated with the IBM BlueMix team, Nasscom’s 10,000 Product Startup initiative, T-Hub, and IIITH’s incubator and IITM Research Park initiatives.
In his new role, Dr. Srikanth Sundararajan will work closely with Ventureast’s earlier portfolio companies to help them scale their business operations, and also focus on the new tech fund VPF II. The first closing of VPF II was announced in September 2016, following which the fund has started investing in seed and early stage businesses. Investments by this fund will retain a strong focus on differentiation through technology, and not just ‘technology enablement’. VPFII focuses on both consumer tech and enterprise tech (SME needs); consumer tech being focused on urban and semi-urban plays in the context of healthcare, fintech, agri-tech, edutech; enterprise tech would be focused on local to global SaaS plays. VPF II’s investments till date include Indus OS, Find Me a Shoe and Celes Care.
Commenting on the appointment, Sarath Naru, Managing Partner of Ventureast said, “The Indian VC sector is at a pivotal point much like the start-ups it invests in. The ‘mantras’ being chanted are different from a year ago, for the right reasons – “a visible path to profitability” being the current one. As our legacy goes, we will focus on businesses where capital is not the primary competitive advantage, but technology is. Dr. Srikanth’s experience globally as an entrepreneur, and his ability to connect with entrepreneurs and focus on tech will be critical in building sustaining businesses.
Srikanth said “With the advent of cutting-edge technology in the VR/AR space, API support, and micro-services, scalable and smart infra being offered by the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and others, the way consumers and enterprises would interact with the ecosystem is evolving. The mobile app space will transform to a unified view of the world, supported by tons of data which need to be distilled leveraging well established techniques like ML/NLP, and then used in a focused manner. What we see today is an early start!”
Prior to Ventureast, Srikanth was the Worldwide Head of Corporate Strategy and Technology and previously, Chief Operating Officer of Persistent Systems, Pvt. Ltd. He was instrumental in establishing industry-leading practices in the areas of Cloud Computing, Mobility, Analytics, and Collaborations, which today drive 50% of the company’s revenues; and serviced marquee clients such as IBM, Microsoft, Force.com, Google, Rack Space, Yahoo, VM Ware, Wells Fargo, among others. During his tenure, the company more than tripled its revenue and had a very successful public offering in 2010. Before Persistent Systems, Srikanth founded Pretzel Logic, a wining software product services business.
About Ventureast
Ventureast is one of the longest standing Venture capital fund managers in India, investing since 1997 and managing close to $400+ million. The company has a diverse portfolio of more than 100 investments in Technology, Healthcare and Clean Environment. Ventureast is possibly the only Indian Fund Manager that has dedicated funds and teams for each sector- life sciences & healthcare, and separately for technology driven businesses. Ventureast has offices in Bangalore, Chennai & Hyderabad.
Ventureast’s investments include:
• Gland Pharma: Global leader in small volume parenterals & low molecular weight heparin; built from Rs 2.5 cr sales at the time of our investment, to $1.35 Billion acquisition by Chinese major.
• Moschip: Built from zero revenues to become India’s first listed, semiconductor product company; created patented new products for laptop accessory market.
• Sresta’s 24 Mantra: An Organic ‘farm to fork’ concept; built from Rs 50 lac sales at time of our investment to close to Rs 1000 crores market value now.
• Little Eye Labs: Tools for App developers; built from ground zero to rapidly being India’s first acquisition by Facebook.
• Atyati: Agent based rural banking tech platform; Built from ground zero in just 5 years to develop a business pipeline well ahead of competitors, and acquired by NYSE listed company.
• Loylty Rewardz: No.1 consumer loyalty company with 300 million+ unique customers. Beat well-funded competitors and acquired by India’s largest payment company.
Ventureast Proactive Fund II: Dr. Srikanth Sundararajan appointed as partner
Dr. Srikanth Sundararajan appointed as partner of Ventureast Proactive Fund II
