Mumbai: Silicon Valley’s marquee venture capital fund, Sequoia Capital, has promoted five of its executives to the position of managing director, as it further bulks up its leadership team amid unprecedented dealmaking in the country’s startup ecosystem.
Ashish Agarwal and Harshjit Sethi from the fund’s venture team, and Tejeshwi Sharma, Ishaan Mittal and Sakshi Chopra from the growth team, will be elevated to the MD level.
The news was announced to the Sequoia team internally on Friday.
When contacted by ET, a Sequoia spokesperson confirmed the development and said, “Today, we are excited to announce significant additions to our leadership team at Sequoia India, a move that underscores our commitment to serve founders better across stages and sectors. We are thrilled to promote Ashish Agarwal and Harshjit Sethi as Managing Directors in our venture team. We are also very excited to appoint Ishaan Mittal, Sakshi Chopra and Tejeshwi Sharma as Managing Directors in our growth team.
The five executives will join existing MDs Rajan Anandan, Shailendra Singh, Mohit Bhatnagar, Ravishankar GV, Shailesh Lakhani, Abheek Anand, Piyush Gupta and Amit Jain.
The promotions come on the back of Sequoia seeing a bunch of its portfolio firms tapping the public markets, leading with food-delivery platform Zomato which had a stellar listing on the Indian bourses on July 23.
In an interview with ET, Shailendra Singh and Rajan Anandan, managing directors, Sequoia Capital India and co-leads of the fund’s Surge accelerator programme, had said a dozen of its firms are at various stages of IPO preparation.
Sequoia Capital India, has backed startups like Byju’s, Razorpay, Oyo among hundred others. It had racked up $195 million for its second seed fund, in addition to the $1.35 billion corpus it raised for India and Southeast Asia in July last year.
Sequoia India has been consistently beefing its leadership team across India and Southeast Asia. Last year, it had announced a slew of appointments, as it brought on board a new marketing chief, public policy head and an operating partner.
