Singapore based Jungle Ventures has announced that Ratan Tata, Chairman Emeritus of the Indian Conglomerate, Tata Sons, and an iconic business leader of modern India, will come on board as a Special Advisor. Founded by Anurag Srivastava and Amit Anand, Jungle Ventures, is an early stage venture capital fund, with a firm focus on helping build innovative technology led companies out of Asia-Pacific
Jungle has already made investments in 30 leading Asian startups, including the likes of Zipdial (recently acquired by Twitter), LiveSpace, Tradegecko, CrayonData, Fastacash and travelmob (acquired by Nasdaq listed HomeAway). In his role as Special Advisor, Tata has formally committed to spend time with Jungle’s portfolio of companies to help them build category leadership, while being ethically impregnable and culturally strong, in Asian and global markets.
Jungle Ventures, launched with a $10 million seed-to-early stage fund in 2012, is currently raising a second fund with a much bigger corpus.
Welcoming Tata on board, Anurag Srivastava, Founding and Managing Partner, Jungle Ventures, said, “I have had the good fortune of working with Mr. Tata in the past and feel honoured to have this opportunity again to work with him. With his wealth of experience, there is probably no better advisor that we can have in this part of the world, to mentor us and our portfolio of companies.”
“For Jungle Ventures, Mr Tata believing in our vision also comes as a validation of our purpose to spawn and nurture entrepreneurship across the Asia-Pacific and help build tech category leaders. With Mr Tata by our side, we have the opportunity to become the most impactful Venture Capital Firm out of the Asia-Pacific, with multiple platforms to enable creation of entrepreneurship and formation of significant companies," Anurag added.
Founded in 2012, Jungle Ventures, is best known for guiding the growth of portfolio companies across Asia, with its ‘operations as a service’ model. Full time partners at the fund offer deep expertise and handhold early stage ventures, across areas like, marketing and design, product management, engineering and recruiting. Some of the other advisors that currently work with Jungle and their start-ups include Gokul Rajaram, Product Engineering Lead at Square, Lim Dershing, Founder of JobsCentral and Alon Sobol, Director of ISP/ Telco Relationships for Spotify.
Amit Anand, Founding and Managing Partner, Jungle Ventures said, “It has already been a humbling experience to work with Mr. Tata and we have found him to be astonishingly responsive, insightful and decisive.”