Prime Venture Partners announced the addition of Ashish Gupta as Partner Emeritus to further strengthen its investment team.

Based in the US, Ashish is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor and VC, having co-founded Helion Ventures in 2005. At Prime, Ashish will be part of the investment committee and will be actively involved in the decision making process of all future investments. He will also serve as a mentor and advisor to the entire portfolio, the fund’s future strategies and guide the team on several aspects of venture capital investing and portfolio management.

Ashish Gupta is well known in both the Indian start-up ecosystem and Silicon Valley. He is a Kauffman Fellow, holds a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University, and a BTech from IIT-Kanpur, where he received the President’s Gold medal.

His first entrepreneurial venture, Junglee (a price-comparison platform) was acquired by Amazon in 1998, following which he founded Tavant Technologies in the year 2000. Known for being a prolific investor, Gupta has been an early investor in start-ups that went on to have very successful exits, such as Flipkart and MuSigma.

Gupta is the co-founder of Helion Venture Partners and serves on several boards including Ezetap, Pubmatic, Simplilearn, SMSGupshup and Naukri. Some of his past investments include Qwikcilver (acquired by Pinelabs), Daksh (acquired by IBM), MakeMyTrip, Upwork, Perfios and Redbus.

“The Indian start-up ecosystem is in a very vibrant phase of its evolution and Prime is well positioned to be a key player in the building of Digital India. I’ve known all the partners Shripati, Amit, Sanjay and Raj for the better part of the last 30 years and am delighted to be working closely with them in helping shape Prime’s next phase of growth,” said Gupta.

Prime Venture Partners is an early-stage VC fund led by Sanjay Swamy, Shripati Acharya and Amit Somani. The fund also has well-known serial entrepreneur, investor and Aadhaar volunteer, Raj Mashruwala, as a Partner Emeritus.

Started in 2012 with the objective of bringing Silicon Valley style professionalism to venture investing and building world-class companies out of India, Prime is often the first institutional investor in category-creating technology start-ups. With the addition of Ashish Gupta, Prime is looking to further boost its portfolio with early-stage investments in fintech, SaaS, enterprise, healthcare, education and logistics.

Shripati Acharya, co-founder and managing partner, Prime Venture Partners, said: “ We’re privileged to have him (Ashish) formally associated with Prime. 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.”

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