Ratan Tata to join Jungle Ventures as special advisor

The Singapore-based venture capital firm has invested in 30 startups in Asia

Tata Sons Chairman Emeritus Ratan Tata will be a special advisor of  Jungle Ventures, a Singapore-based venture capital firm that invests in early stage technology companies, to mentor the firm’s founders and investment companies.

Jungle will be the second venture firm Tata would be advising. He took a similar role in Bengaluru-based early-stage investment firm Kalaari Capital Advisors, in February.

Since his retirement from Tata Group, Tata has been making personal investments in start-ups, including online taxi-hailing firm Ola, which the company announced on July 1.

Jungle has invested in 30 start-ups in Asia, including Zipdial (bought by Twitter), LiveSpace, Tradegecko, CrayonData, Fastacash and travelmob (acquired by Nasdaq-listed HomeAway).  

In his new role, Tata has committed to spend time with Jungle’s portfolio of companies to help them build category leadership, while being ethically and culturally strong, in Asian and global markets, Jungle Ventures founders Anurag Srivastava and Amit Anand said.

Jungle launched with a $10 million seed-to-early stage fund in 2012. It is currently raising a second fund, with a much bigger corpus.

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. “With his wealth of experience, there is probably no better advisor we can have in this part of the world, to mentor us and our portfolio of companies,” Srivastava said.