BS People: Sasha Mirchandani

Start-up specialist

He has a passion for working with start-ups and is deeply involved in the development of entrepreneurship in India. Sasha Mirchandani, who recently quit Blue River Ventures as senior investment director, is founder of Mumbai Angels, India's first angel investment group.

This passion led him to invest in well-know companies, including Inmobi, Myntra, Dhama Innovations, Fractal Analytics and Canvera. He is on the board at Fractal Analytics, Dhama Innovations, Hathway Cable & Datcom and Cnergyis. Mirchandani is also a past president of the Mumbai chapter of the Young Entrepreneurs’ Organisation.

At Blue River Ventures, Mirchandani helped portfolio companies build low-cost operations in India to improve capital efficiencies and to leverage BlueRun Ventures’ global platform to help Indian companies expand globally. As part of his responsibilities at Blue Run, he focused on the consumer internet, mobile, media, entertainment and knowledge process outsourcing sectors.

Mirchandani is in transition to a new job without any further details known at this time. He will most probably start a new fund on his own.

Mirchandani does understand what it takes to build a business and build a good one at that. He is the son of Gulu Mirchandani, chairman & managing director of Mirc Electronics that manufactures the Onida Brand of electronics products. Schooled at Kodaikanal International School, he went on to obtain a business administration degree from University of Virginia, which he followed up with another advanced management course from IIM Ahmedabad.

PE industry players indicate that Mirchandani built a good platform for Blue River Ventures. Blue River is an offshoot of Nokia Ventures, which was spun off as a separate fund with its role being that of a limited partner and was involved in building high-tech start-ups across Europe and Silicon Valley.