Early-stage venture capital firm Peak XV Partners has witnessed another high-profile departure, adding to a string of senior-level exits.
Managing director Harshjit Sethi is the latest to step down from his position at the firm. Sethi had joined Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India & SEA) in 2015 after relocating from Silicon Valley, where he led product development at Dropbox.
“After a decade at Sequoia India and Peak XV, I’ve decided to leave the firm and explore new innings,” Sethi said. “When I first moved back from the Bay Area in 2015, both India and venture capital were experiments for me….The Indian startup ecosystem has since evolved tremendously – the ambition of founders, scale of companies, digital infrastructure on which they are built, and the vibrancy of our capital markets have all grown faster than I first predicted,” he added.
During his tenure, Sethi primarily made fintech and SaaS bets, working closely with founders. He advised and was on the board of several marquee portfolio companies, including jobtech platform apna, fintech unicorn BharatPe, HRtech company Darwinbox, AI platform Sarvam AI, fintech startups Bright Money, Turtlemint and smallcase, among others.
Before joining Peak XV, Sethi was a consultant at McKinsey & Company between 2011 and 2013, where he advised technology firms in the Bay Area on pricing, sales strategy, and due diligence. Sethi’s entrepreneurial interests go back to his Stanford days, when he founded the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp, one of the university’s largest undergraduate conferences, sponsored by Sequoia Capital.
Sethi’s exit adds to a series of senior-level departures at Peak XV Partners in recent months. Other recent exits include chief product officer Anuj Sahai, managing partners Shailesh Lakhani and Abheek Anand, investor Shraeyansh Thakur, human capital director Anirudh Bose Mullick, and senior leaders such as Piyush Gupta, Gayatri Vasudeva Yadav, and Shweta Rajpal Kohli.
