Amit Jain, who quit ride-hailing company Uber earlier this year, has joined venture capital firm Sequoia Capital India as a managing director.
Sequoia said in a blog post that Jain will join the firm's growth team to advise on new opportunities and help existing growth-stage companies in India and Southeast Asia.
Jain, who will be based out of Singapore, has over 20 years of operating experience. He had taken over as Uber's India operations chief in 2015. Subsequently, he was head of Uber's Asia-Pacific business in 2018. Prior to Uber, he was president at Los Angles-based housing classifieds firm Rent.com. He has also worked at TPG Capital and McKinsey & Company.
Sequoia Capital India, which has invested in more than 130 startups in India including unicorns such as Ola, MuSigma and Zomato, had last year split its investment team into venture and growth verticals in line with a strategy it follows in the US and China.
At the time, managing director Shailendra Singh had told VCCircle that the India market had evolved to a point where there was depth in the growth equity segment.
This is Sequoia’s second high-profile appointment from a global technology giant this year. Earlier this year, Sequoia appointed Google Southeast Asia and India vice-president Rajan Anandan as managing director to focus on its newly launched accelerator programme Surge.
These appointments come even as Sequoia has lost some senior executives since 2017.
In August last year, Abhay Pandey, a managing director who had been with Sequoia for more than 11 years, decided to leave. Interestingly, on the same day, Sequoia had closed its sixth fund at $695 million to invest in early- and growth-stage companies in the country and Southeast Asia.
Pandey's exit followed the resignation of managing director VT Bharadwaj, who decided to step down in April 2018 after 11 years with the firm. In June 2017, Gautam Mago, another managing director at Sequoia, had resigned after 10 years.
Pandey, Bharadwaj and Mago later floated venture capital firm A91 Partners, which exceeded the target corpus for its debut fund earlier this year. Kaushik Anand, who was the India head of CapitalG, also joined A91 Partners last year.
