Mumbai: Singapore-based venture capital fund Jungle Ventures on Thursday said Ratan Tata, chairman emeritus of Tata Sons Ltd, will join the company as special advisor.
Founded by Anurag Srivastava and Amit Anand in 2012, Jungle Ventures is an early stage technology-focused venture capital fund. It has investments in 30 Asian start-ups, including Zipdial (acquired by Twitter), LiveSpace, TradeGecko, CrayonData, Fastacash and travelmob (acquired by Nasdaq-listed HomeAway).
Tata has committed to spend time with Jungle’s portfolio of companies to help them build category leadership, said a statement from Jungle Ventures. Jungle Ventures launched with a $10 million seed-to-early stage fund in 2012 and is currently raising a second fund with a much bigger corpus.
In February, Tata had joined venture capital firm Kalaari Capital in an advisory role.
On Wednesday, online taxi-hailing service Ola said Tata has made an undisclosed investment in the company, his seventh investment in a domestic start-up in the past 11 months. Tata had earlier invested in other online ventures such as marketplace Snapdeal, furniture store Urban Ladder, recharge and mobile commerce platform Paytm, auto classifieds portal CarDekho, jewellery store Bluestone and women’s fashion store Kaaryah.
Anurag Srivastava, founder and managing partner at 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.”
