Bengaluru : Tata Sons Chairman Emeritus, Ratan Tata will act as a special advisor to Jungle Ventures, a Singapore-based venture capital firm that invests in early stage technology companies.
Tata took up a similar role in Bengaluru-based early stage investment firm Kalaari Capital Advisors in February.
Since his retirement from the Tata Group, Tata has been making personal investments in startups, the most recent in online taxi-hailing firm Ola Cabs.
Jungle Ventures has invested in 30 startups in Asia, including Zipdial (bought 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, Jungle Ventures founders Anurag Srivastava and Amit Anand said in a statement.
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.
Some of the other advisors that currently working 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.
“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,” Srivastava said.
