Early-stage venture capital firm YourNest has named Sharad Sharma, co-founder and CEO of iSPIRT, as a member of the advisory board of the recently launched Rs 300 crore YourNest India VC Fund II.
Ashish Gupta, former COO at Evalueserve and founder of Benori Ventures; and Rishikesha T Krishnan, director, IIM Indore, will also join the fund’s eight-member advisory board, YourNest said in a statement. The remaining five board members will be representatives of institutional investors.
In late 2016, YourNest launched YourNest India Fund II with a corpus of Rs 300 crore to offer pre-Series A funding to four-eight ventures every year. The fund will focus on startups operating in Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, electronic system design, advanced robotics, enterprise software and mobile internet.
Sharma is co-founder of iSPIRT, a think tank for Indian software products. He was CEO of Yahoo! India R&D centre. He also co-founded Teltier which is now part of Cisco. Gupta is an entrepreneur and angel investor. Krishnan is an expert in the area of innovation.
The board will offer strategic direction to the YourNest team on investment strategy, corporate governance and leadership development.
Sunil K Goyal, founder and CEO, YourNest, said, “YourNest’s work is expanding rapidly as we continue to back the best in the Indian startup ecosystem. Each of our advisors brings incredible knowledge and experience in various realms of VC funding and startup ecosystem, and will make the entire team wiser with their inputs''.
From its Fund 1, YourNest has invested in companies such as Arya.ai, Uniphore, Mycity4kids and GolfLan. The first fund’s advisory board include Alok Mittal, R Satya Narayan, Badri Aggarwal, MM Pant, Ramesh Dharmaji (SIDBI’s nominee) and Purvi Parkeria (IIFL’s nominee).
Founded in April 2011 by Goyal, Sanjay Pande and Girish Shivani, YourNest brought Vivek Mansingh on board as a general partner. Its portfolio consists of 16 companies, including Uniphore Software, mycity4kids, Rubique, Arya.ai, Smart Software Testing Solutions, Simpli5d, SmartQ, seeDoc, Fashalot, aahaa stores, MoMark and GolfLAN.
The first fund, which was launched in 2012 with a corpus of Rs 90 crore, saw subscription from 144 individual investors and three institutional investors—SIDBI’s India Opportunity Fund, IIFL Seed Ventures and Northgate Capital.
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