Social impact fund Unitus Seed Fund on Monday named former McKinsey veteran Aditya Sharma as a venture partner.
It also expanded its investment advisory committee by adding Padma Chandrasekaran, founder and president of internet business at Sify, and Ganesh Rengaswamy, co-founder and partner at Quona Capital, and founder of Travelguru.
Sharma has about two decades of experience working in global firms such as McKinsey, JP Morgan Chase, eVentures and Capital One across the US, Europe, Asia and Australia.
He has also served as managing director and member of global management committee at Williams Lea, which was later acquired by Deutsche WorldNet for $1 billion. He is a co-founder of The Whitefield Group and was the managing director at eVentures, the first seed investor to back online travel agency MakeMyTrip.
Unitus Seed Fund was founded in 2012 and is based in Bengaluru and Seattle. The fund, which is focused on healthcare, education, mobile, e-commerce, retail and agriculture, has a corpus of $23 million and made five new investments last year. Besides, its portfolio companies raised $14.8 million in 2015. It had also floated an accelerator for impact VCs last year which is managed by Capria Ventures.
The appointments come at a time when Unitus is looking to step up its investing and fundraising activity this year, managing partner Will Poole said. “We’re looking to make 8-10 new investments this year. We’re seeing exciting companies in healthcare and financial technology and consumer mobile segments, which have giant new markets opening up given the continued increase in smartphone and internet penetration in small town and rural India,” he said.
The additions will not only help the company manage its current portfolio but also help with the new fund that USF is going to raise soon. In a conversation with VCCircle last year, USF managing partner and co-founder Dave Richards had announced a new fund to its portfolio in 2016.