Kalaari Capital appoints Saurav Banerjee, Devneet Bajaj as Venture Partners, aims to strengthen its leadership team

The recent Partner-level appointments have been made as strategic additions aimed at creating more breadth and depth of leadership within Kalaari Capital and to bring diverse perspectives to the investment team.

Early-stage venture capital firm Kalaari Capital has appointed Saurav Banerjee and Devneet Bajaj to its leadership team as Venture Partners. Saurav was previously Co-CEO of NDTV, while Devneet founded the Mahindra & Mahindra-backed agri-tech startup MITRA.

Vani Kola, Managing Director of Kalaari Capital, described the appointments as strategic additions aimed at creating more breadth and depth of leadership within the firm and to bring diverse perspectives to the investment team.

“In line with Kalaari’s philosophy of empowering entrepreneurs, the venture partner program offers industry expertise and scalability knowledge to support our portfolio startups to succeed,” she added.

Kalaari’s Venture Partner Program is aimed at bringing in senior executives with decades of deep operating experience to add value to its portfolio of startups and diversity to its investment team. Former KPMG executive Sreedhar Prasad joined Kalaari Capital in November 2018 as Venture Partner.

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“Over the last few years I had been working on creating and nurturing new initiatives at NDTV. I deeply enjoy identifying right investment opportunities, fundraising, managing growth and mentoring future leaders and Kalaari provides me a platform to do that and give back to the startup ecosystem,” Saurav said in his statement.

“Kalaari’s phenomenal brand recognition, over 12 years of rare and deep institutional knowledge, Vani’s leadership and a high potential team gives me a fantastic opportunity to support entrepreneurs to succeed,” Devneet said.

The hiring comes a year after partners Sumit Jain, Bala Srinivasa and Prashanth Aluru left the firm.

Founded in 2006, Bengaluru-based Kalaari Capital currently has a 30-member team. The firm's portfolio includes online gaming startup Dream11, wellness venture Cure.fit, hyperlocal player MilkBasket, ecommerce enabler Shop 101, Flipkart-owned fashion brand Myntra and online furniture brand UrbanLadder, among others. Most recently, Kalaari led a $4 million Series A funding round in agritech startup AgNext.

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(Disclaimer: Kalaari Capital is an investor in YourStory.)