India’s Prime Venture names Helion co-founder as partner
Ashish Gupta (pictured), a co-founder of Helion Ventures, has joined Indian VC firm Prime Venture Partners as a partner emeritus. He will remain based in the US.
Gupta founded Helion in 2005 alongside Sanjeev Aggarwal, Rahul Chandra and Kanwaljit Singh. The trio have now established separate VC firms of their own. Chandra is now part of growth-stage technology fund The Fundamentum Partnership while Singh and Aggarwal have launched consumer-focused VC firm Fireside Ventures and Arkam Ventures, formerly known as Unitary Helion, respectively.
Prime Venture, which seeks to bring venture capital practices common in Silicon Valley to India, will place Gupta on its investment committee, where he is expected to help with fund strategy, portfolio management and serve as a mentor to start-up founders and team members.
Gupta's experience includes founding Junglee, an India-focused shopping portal that was acquired by Amazon in 1998. He will remain on the boards of several Helion portfolio companies such as payment card reader manufacturer Ezetap, online advertising software developer Pubmatic, online certification provider Simplilearn, and market leading job portal Naukri.
“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,” said Shripati Acharya, a co-founder and managing partner at Prime Venture.
Prime has raised three funds, the most recent of which raised $72 million (INR4 billion) in 2018. The firm's current portoflio includes around 25 companies such as invoice discounting platform KredX, MoneyTap and neighborhood security app MyGate.
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