Team Ojas is led by Dr Rajesh Srivathsa and is supported by individuals who have either been entrepreneurs themselves or worked with start-ups for much of their careers and understand to a good extent, the challenges that arise in nurturing a company from an idea to a scalable, profitable, competitive business.
Rajesh and the Ojas team aim to leverage their operational expertise to support entrepreneurs and help create successful and profitable companies. Team Ojas consists of the following members
Dr Rajesh Srivathsa, Managing Partner:
rajesh@ojasventures.com
Before Ojas, Rajesh was the Business Head helping manage P&L for the Mobile Terminals Business Unit (MTBU) at Aricent, Inc which licensed products and provided services across the mobile ecosystem. MTBU was created through the merger of several units from different companies, one of which was Emuzed, Inc., a startup based in California with R&D in India. As the CTO of Emuzed and Head of Sales & Marketing for the mobile business, Rajesh was responsible for customer acquisition & revenues, strategic business initiatives, ecosystem development & management and interfacing with a cross border engineering team. Prior to Emuzed, he spearheaded development of video systems for the broadcast market at Lucent Digital Video, an internal venture funded by Lucent Ventures and subsequently acquired by Lucent Technologies. Before LDV, he was at IBM Watson Research Center responsible for development of advanced algorithms and implementation on embedded chips. He holds a Bachelor of Technology, Master of Science and a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the National Institute of Technology Karnataka at Suratkal, University of Texas at Austin and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign respectively. Rajesh has represented Lucent and IBM in international standard bodies such as MPEG and SMPTE. He has several articles and patents to his credit. Rajesh loves to travel; he has travelled as far down south as the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica and Finland in the north. He is a student of Taek-wondo and a practitioner of Vipassana meditation.
Pavan Krishnamurthy, Partner:
pavan@ojasventures.com
Pavan has over 15 years experience across various industries such as early stage investing, consulting, venture advisory, research etc. In the recent past, he has worked with Nadathur Holdings and Investments (an early stage venture capital firm focused on technology & life sciences ventures), SRW Advisors (an advisory & mentor capital firm that worked with entrepreneurial ventures in areas such as strategy, business model/plan development, finance, mentoring etc) and Syndicated Research Group (US based research advisory firm that provided research advisory services to senior executives of Fortune 500 companies in the domains of Human Capital Strategies and Corporate Finance Strategies). In the past, Pavan has also worked as a CFO for two venture backed companies in the domain of internet applications and media besides stints with Ernst & Young and Price Waterhouse in their Assurance and Advisory practices. Pavan is a Chartered Accountant by qualification and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics, Economics & Statistics. Pavan is a keen student of philosophy/mysticism and is helping couple of not for profit organizations in this space
Gautam Balijepalli, Partner:
gautam@ojasventures.com
Gautam has more than 12 years of experience in the technology sector in venture investing, business development and software development. Prior to Ojas, he was with the venture capital team at Nomura (NYSE: NMR), Japan’s largest investment bank, based in London. During his time at Nomura, he has syndicated investments of around $60m. He led and managed investments in Compellent (NYSE: CML), Revivio (Symantec) and NetForensics, as part of a team. Prior to Nomura, he gained experience in Business Development at Sun Microsystems and had significant senior management exposure while working on marketing initiatives for Sun's software products. Gautam has experience in creating sales & marketing strategies targeted at CIOs as well as consulting to them on strategic IT initiatives. He has also held roles in consulting at PricewaterhouseCoopers (IBM) and software development at Infosys. Gautam has a Bachelor’s degree in Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and an MBA from London Business School.
Raghu Batta, Partner:
raghu@ojasventures.com
Raghu joined Ojas Ventures in June 2008, after a five year stint at VantagePoint Venture Partners (San Bruno, CA), with an investment focus on wireline/wireless infrastructure-applications and digital media infrastructure. At VPVP, he was a key member of team that led investments in Spatial Wireless (sold for $275M to Alcatel), Widevine, (software based security platforms for IPTV and Open Internet), Entrisphere (sold to Ericsson for $290M), LiveScribe (revolutionary SmartPen computer), ProtoStar (Satellites over South Asia), Iand Innopath (over the air updates for cellphones). He also sold two companies (Kagoor Networks to Juniper and Alopa Networks to C-Cor), as a board member representing VantagePoint.
Prior to VantagePoint, he worked for over 11 years at various Data Comm and Telecoms companies in the San Francisco Bay Area in Prod Mgmt, Business Development and M&A at various companies that include Madge Networks, Bay Networks, Assured Access, Alcatel, and CopperCom.
Raghu has an MBA from Baruch College, New York and B.E from Manipal Institute of Technology. |
