Ratan Tata joins Jungle Ventures as special advisor

A day after reports said Ratan Tata has invested in online car trader Ola (See: Ratan Tata invests in Ola in his personal capacity), the Tata Group chairman emeritus is now reported to have joined the board of Singapore-based Jungle Ventures 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 innovative technology-led companies based out of Asia-Pacific.

Jungle has already invested in 30 leading Asian startups, 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 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.

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.

''Tata's coming on board fits seamlessly with Jungle's vision to build Asia's foremost platform to support path breaking and high growth ventures in consumer internet and enterprise technology,'' the company said in a release.

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).

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.

Amit Anand, founding and managing partner, Jungle Ventures said, ''Tata, with his experience of steering India's most respected conglomerate to one of the largest Asian born multinationals and with his personal passion for entrepreneurship, will bring immense value to us and the portfolio companies. As our companies look to become global category leaders in various markets, Mr. Tata will help us and our entrepreneurs understand the economics and dynamics of those markets. It has already been a humbling experience to work with Mr. Tata and we have found him to be astonishingly responsive, insightful and decisive.''