Mid stage focused venture capital firm Iron Pillar has roped in Pavan A Gupte, who has previously worked with private equity firms such as KKR and Adams Street Partners, as a board partner.
Gupte has helped build investment management firms in Mumbai, London and Singapore covering emerging markets and western Europe, said Iron Pillar in a LinkedIn post.
Gupte was industry advisor at KKR between March 2019 and April 2020. Prior to this he was managing director at Samena Capital between early 2016 and late 2018.
Earlier, he has been on various investment and management committees in global firms such as Adams Street Partners, Gartmore/Hermes GPE and CVCI Private Equity since 2001.
Earlier this month, Iron Pillar added three senior professionals to its investment team -- Sajid Fazalbhoy as partner, Pavan Gupte as a board partner and Rahul Garg as principal.
Fazalbhoy was previously with Blume Ventures. Gupte has more than 20 years of alternative investments experience with firms like CVCI, KKR and Hermes GPE. Garg was previously with Kalaari Capital and Lehman Brothers.
Meanwhile, Sameer Nath, co-founder of Iron Pillar, floated his own mid stage focused TrueScale Capital earlier this year. VCCircle wrote at that time that TrueScale's mandate is uncannily similar to that of Iron Pillar as it also plans to invest in companies at the Series B and C stages across consumer and enterprise technology sectors.
Iron Pillar, one of the few mid stage technology investors in India, is currently raising its second fund.
Earlier this month, it said it has received $10 million (Rs 74 crore) for its second fund from Allana Group, an Indian exporter of processed food products and agro commodities.
The second fund has already made two investments -- CoreStack, a cloud governance and compliance software-as-a-software (SaaS) startup, and Ushur, a US-based no-code automation company.
Iron Pillar had marked the final close of its debut fund at $90 million in October 2018. It topped up its debut fund with $45 million in May last year to help portfolio firms tide over the coronavirus crisis.
Its investments from the debut fund include FreshtoHome, Uniphore, Bluestone and Servify.
