Kalaari Capital strengthens investment team with 3 new appointments

Bengaluru-based venture capital firm, Kalaari Capital has strengthened its leadership team with three appointments in the investment and operations teams.

According to The Economic Times, Kalaari has roped in former partner at consulting firm Bain & Company Prashanth Aluru as a partner, and Pooja Gupta, former HR head for fashion retailer Myntra, as head - portfolio HR. In addition, Kalaari has made the first senior hire for its seed programme Kstart by appointing Muthiah Venkateswaran as partner. He has previously worked with McKinsey and Texas Instruments.

The new hires come after Kalaari, an early investor in e-commerce firms Snapdeal and Myntra, raised $290 million (Rs 1,922 crore) last year. ET notes that Kalaari is now building an operations team, just like others in the industry such as Sequoia Capital India and Accel India have already done. Vani Kola, Managing Director at Kalaari said in the report,

As our portfolio companies have grown, both in numbers and size, the help that we can offer and make a difference often becomes more complex. We have been thinking how at each functional level we can help them.

Kalaari had Prasanna HK and Karthik Nageswaran who work with portfolio companies in finance. With Pooja now leading HR, the VC firm eventually plans to add executives for functions like legal, technology and marketing,

At Kalaari, Prashanth will focus on investments across enterprise software, consumer internet, cloud, big-data analytics, healthcare tech and logistics.

Muthiah has joined as the first partner at Kstart, where Kalaari plans to invest about $20 million (about Rs 135 crore) in up to 40 startups over the next two years.

Kalaari had also added several new advisors last year. Former Microsoft India chairman Ravi Venkatesan and Silicon Valley veteran Ram Gupta were roped in to work with startups in Kalaari Capital's portfolio. The venture firm already has Tata Group Chairman-Emeritus Ratan Tata as a Special Advisor.

Website - Kalaari Capital

(Disclaimer: Kalaari Capital is an investor in YourStory)

Related read from February 2016: Kalaari Capital launches Kstart, a unique seed programme for early-stage startups