Prime Venture Partners

Prime Venture Partners is an early-stage Venture Capital (VC) fund led by Sanjay Swamy, Shripati Acharya & Amit Somani. We are often the first institutional investor in category-defining tech-startups.

Prime started in 2012 with the objective of building world class companies out of India. It was originally called AngelPrime and renamed to Prime Venture Partners in 2015.

Prime is led by partners with deep experience both as entrepreneurs and operators. We work closely with founders to understand the context of their business - be it in hiring, business strategy, sales, marketing, business model or fundraising.

Our team Sanjay Swamy, Founder & Managing Partner

Sanjay loves his wacky sense of humour ‐ entrepreneurs who work with us will have to deal with a handful of self‐graded B‐grade puns!

Sanjay is well known for his founding role at ZipDial (now acquired by Twitter) and his role at mChek, the path breaking startup in secure payments, Sanjay has trodden the path of an entrepreneur all through his career. After completing his bachelor's degree in engineering, Sanjay headed to Paris where he earned his Master's degree.

After a stint at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, Sanjay embarked on a journey to build world class teams and products that took him through startups like Ketera and Portal Software, mChek, Zipdial & Ezetap which he co‐founded in 2010.

An active member of the community, Sanjay is a Rotarian and a charter member of TiE, a volunteer at iSPIRT, and organizes the Fintech Panel at the Nasscom Product Conclave. He also played a prominent role on the UIDAI project under the leadership of Nandan Nilekani. He is a frequent speaker and evangelist in the entrepreneurship and payments circuits in the country. Sanjay loves to blog ‐ anything you say that is half‐way intelligent will turn into a subject for his blog.

Shripati Acharya, Founder & Managing Partner

Entrepreneurs who work with us will have to deal with his eating raw plants & veggies from time to time ‐ anyone who can out‐veggie Shripati is automatically funded!

Throughout his career, be it as a business lead at Cisco or as a co‐founder of Snapfish, the world's largest photo site acquired by HP or at Transarc, which was acquired by IBM, Shripati has combined his passion to build great teams, an extraordinary desire to excel and a keen eye for spotting the tales. He is known for being astute with a razor sharp intellect and a Zen‐like devotion to data driven decision‐making.

Shripati has also worked alongside Mr. Nandan Nilekani on the UIDAI project. Having spent substantial parts of working career in the United States and India addressing worldwide markets, Shripati brings a global management perspective. His passion for Indian business was seeded when he interned for Boston Consulting Group in India and has grown through investments in and mentoring of Indian online startups over the last decade. Shripati enjoys the great outdoors and has hitchhiked through Europe and trekked the wind swept mountains of the Himalayas and the Andes.

A firm believer in healthy living, Shripati diligently practises competitive yoga and interactive meditation and a deforestation diet ‐ every organic shop in Bangalore has his number on speed dial.

Amit Somani, Managing Partner

Amit has more than 20 years of experience in technology and internet industries and is also deeply engaged with the early stage ecosystem in India. In his previous role as the Chief Products Officer for MakeMyTrip, Amit led the entire online product portfolio. He was a part of the leadership team that took the company public on NASDAQ in 2010. Amit has also been the head of various teams focusing on search, mobile and advertisement products at Google. One of his products (the search‐based keyword tool) won the Google founder's award. Prior to his role at Google, Amit was the Director for the Enterprise Search and Discovery business at IBM San Jose, California.

Amit holds a B.S Computer Science (Gold medalist) from Indian Institute of Technology Varanasi and a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has published several papers and holds seven US patents. When he is not busy mentoring and working with entrepreneurs, Amit loves to travel around the world, is a sports enthusiast, enjoys reading and is a fusion chef! AmitSomani

Gaurav Ranjan, Principal

Gaurav has 6+ years of experience across Strategy, Operations, Business Development, PnL Management and Category & Vendor Management. His last two stints have been with early stage startups where he was part of the leadership team and has worked across functions to build and scale the business from grounds up.

Gaurav holds an MBA from IIM Calcutta and BE in Computer Science from BIT Mesra.

Mrs. Shivani Kulkarni, Associate Vice President

Shivani has 4+ years of experience in start-up investments, M&A and fund-raising. Her last stint was at Flipkart where she worked with the CorpDev & Venture Investment team and helped set up an early-stage fund. She is always excited about new business models and loves interacting and brainstorming ideas with founders. In previous roles she has worked closely with startups in the Fintech, Agritech and Consumer Tech sectors.

Shivani holds an MBA from XLRI Jamshedpur and BE from PESIT Bangalore. In her free time, she enjoys dancing, playing badminton and travelling.

Pankaj Agarwal, Associate Vice President

Pankaj spent his decade-long career doing early/growth stage operating roles in category-defining startups across ride-hailing, internet commerce and fintech sectors. He is a big believer in technology first solutions and keen to partner with passionate founders tackling the biggest problems we are facing as a society.

Pankaj holds an MBA from Kellogg Sch

Address: Miraya Rose, A block, 1st floor, 66/1, Varthur Rd, Siddapura, Whitefield, Bengaluru, Karnataka 560066, India

Email: info@primevp.in