Ratan Tata to join Jungle Ventures as Special Advisor

The Singapore-based Jungle Ventures has announced that Ratan Tata, Chairman Emeritus of Tata Sons, will come on board as a Special Advisor.

Founded by Anurag Srivastava and Amit Anand, Jungle Ventures is an early stage venture capital fund focussed on helping build innovative technology-led companies in Asia-Pacific.

The venture fund said it has already made investments in 30 leading Asian start-ups, including 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 spending 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, the venture fund said in a statement.

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, it said.

"For Jungle Ventures, 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," said Srivastava, founding and managing partner, Jungle Ventures.

Some of the other advisors who 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.

Over the last two years, Tata has invested in over 10 start-ups in his personal capacity to encourage the ecosystem, including online marketplace Snapdeal, online furniture retailer Urban Ladder and most recently, taxi aggregator Ola, among others.

Image: Ratan Tata; Photograph: Rediff Archives