A homegrown early-stage VC firm set up in 2012 has roped in Ashish Gupta, Junglee.com and Helion Ventures co-founder, to strengthen its investment team.
Prime Venture Partners has appointed Gupta as a partner emeritus, the second person to be given the designation after entrepreneur and investor Raj Mashruwala.
At Prime Venture Partners, entrepreneur and angel investor Gupta will also function as a mentor to investee companies.
“This will be a huge step in helping us further improve the quality of our investment decisions, as well as an excellent value-add for our entrepreneurs building companies out of India and globally,” Prime Venture Partners co-founder and managing partner Shripati Acharya said.
The firm added that Gupta’s addition to its team will also help boost its investments in categories including financial technology, software-as-a-service, enterprise, healthcare, and logistics.
Gupta is an alumnus of Stanford University and the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur. He is also a Kauffman Fellow. His first business, price-comparison platform Junglee, was acquired by e-commerce platform Amazon in 1998.
He has also been an early investor in startups including Amazon competitor Flipkart and MuSigma. He co-founded Helion Venture Partners in 2006, with the firm focussing on the early- to mid-stage. Its portfolio includes BigBasket, BlueStacks, Toppr and iD.
Prime Venture Partners
The firm was founded by Acharya, Sanjay Swamy, and Amit Somani, and says it is often the first institutional investor in technology startups. It has over 25 companies in its portfolio.
The firm is currently investing out of its third fund. The fund had made the close at $60 million initially in early 2018 but the corpus was later increased to $72 million after receiving more commitments from its Limited Partners.
In a podcast with VCCircle earlier this week, Swamy said the fund is on track to remain as active as in any other year. The VC firm may even do an extra deal or so, he said.
Some of Prime Venture Partners’ recent transactions include digital transactions-focussed Recko, Bengaluru-based consumer lending platform MoneyTap, education-technology startup Sunstone, and security management startup MyGate.
