Venture capitalist Ram Shriram, whose stake in Google was once valued at $1.3 billion, has sold a part of his remaining small stake in search engine giant Google for $31 million. Shriram, who also sits on the board of Google, sold the shares over the last two months, according to a report in Business Insider.
Shriram and his wife sold around 42,000 shares for approximately $730 a unit as the stock reached an all time high on reports of Google settling the three-year antitrust case with European Union officials.
According to the report, Shriram still has over 150,000 shares left, which would be worth approximately $114 million according to Google’s closing market price on Monday.
Shriram is one of the first investors and founding board member of Google and had held about 2.2 per cent of the company at the time of its IPO in 2004 with over 5 million shares.
He is also the founding board member if 247customer.com.
Shriram was part of Netscape’s executive team and later founded Junglee, an online comparison shopping firm which was acquired by Amazon.com in 1998. After the deal, he worked at Amazon.com for while before becoming a full time investor.
Shriram currently runs venture capital firm Sherpalo Ventures, which has been an active investor in Indian startups. Sherpalo’s investments in India include mobile ad network InMobi, online travel portal Cleartrip, mobile payments firm Paymate, digital maps provider MapMyIndia and classifieds player Info Edge India.
According to the recent Forbes listing, Shriram had a net worth of $1.6 billion.
(Edited by Prem Udayabhanu)