Adith has a total of 21+ years of work experience. Started his career with ICICI Bank as the Product Manager for Alternates in the International Private Banking Division. In 2007, he started his first venture in the F&B space called Crepeteria. Raised seed funding and grew it to 3 cities and multiple franchisees. Post exiting Crepeteria, Adith joined a boutique investment bank, where he learnt the fundamentals of investing and analysing companies. In 2014, he joined the investment team at Motilal Oswal PE Fund. 4 years at the private equity fund with 2 growth stage investments and 2 successful exits, laid the foundation of Gemba Capital.
Gemba Capital is an institutional, thesis driven, high conviction pre-seed and seed stage VC fund backing bold and ambitious founders. Set up in 2018, Gemba Capital has evolved from being a single-family office to a syndicate and then finally into a Pre-seed VC Fund.
Adith has invested in 50+ startups over the years. He brings a mix of growth stage investing, early stage investing and IB experience along with himself being an Operator and an Entrepreneur.
Adith has followed an unconventional path and has been a risk taker. His style of investing is more about assessing Founder Market Fit and directional tailwinds in the market. Besides investing and reading, he enjoys music, movies, travel and food.
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Belonging to a traditional business family from a small town, Govind has spent over a decade within the startup ecosystem as an investor and operator. In his last role as Vice President, Govind was part of the senior leadership at Upscalio, where he led M&A and Corporate Strategy. Prior to that, Govind spent more than 5 years at Contrarian Capital, a seed stage VC fund where he led investments in startups such Pratilipi, Progcap, Signzy, Squadstack, to name a few.
A 0 to 1 guy, he truly appreciates the challenges and the complexities faced by founders everyday. while scaling their venture. As a VC, what drives him the most is an opportunity to watch and learn up-close from Founders who are sheer forces of nature.
He is passionate about the broader consumer space and applications of AI in transforming human lives.
Govind is an MBA and CFA. He enjoys single malts, poker and cricket and prefers the mountains.
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Kamini is passionate about technology, education and Web3. She has over 7 years of experience in early stage investing. At Gemba Capital, Kamini focuses on investments in Fintech and B2B Commerce domains.
Before transitioning to her role as an early-stage investor, she worked as a Business Analyst at Indus Valley Partners and as an early team member at Byju’s.
She has completed her Masters from JBIMS and B. Tech from NIT.
She has completed 7 high altitude Himalayan treks and ran a TMM full marathon in the last 3 years.
In her leisure time, she can be found reading non-fiction books, trekking, playing Squash and running.
After completing engineering, Vipul worked as Business Development Manager in an EdTech and an Ecom marketplace for 3 years. Then became CMO for Sattviko (packaged food brand). In 2014 Vipul started Bakerybite (marketplace for bakery items).
In 2015 he started FinTechLabs (digital lending platform as a service) which got acquired by Perfios in 2019.
In 2017 FinTechLabs' second product Fin360 got acquired by FinBit which got acquired by Yodlee.
Vipul worked as V.P. of International Business Growth at Perfios and is currently leading New Initiatives at smallcase since Apr'21. In his spare time, he likes to travel, swim, dance and play board games.
Ranjeet is the co-Founder and CEO of Pratilipi, India's largest storytelling platform across multiple formats and languages. Pratilipi's eponymous online literature product has over 1 million writers whose stories are read over 550 million times each month. Pratilipi has so far raised more than USD 80 million in funding from the likes of Krafton, Tencent, and Nexus.
Pratilipi also owns Pratilipi Comics, Pratilipi FM, IVM Podcasts and Westland Books under its umbrella. Many of Pratilipi's stories have also been adapted for different TV shows and web series across different languages. Pratilipi’s alumni network includes startups like Kutumb, Animall and Pazy.
Ranjeet is an avid reader and enjoys spending time with budding entrepreneurs and helping them in their startup journey. He is an MBA (FMS Delhi).
Sahil is a Technology leader with 20+ years of experience in building and scaling products across FinTech, B2B, Mar-tech, and Consumer Tech domains. He has a passion for coding and holds 5 patents.
He currently serves as the Engineering Fellow and Head of GCOO Domain at Natwest (one of two such fellows globally), leading multiple engineering excellence initiatives across colleague experience, SaaS tools, Mar-tech etc.
Sahil began his career at Cisco, where he led the development of Cisco’s Virtual Services Exchange Platform and grew the engineering team from 1 to 100+. After a decade at Cisco, he joined Intuit, where he invented a patent utilizing AI/ML to provide support to agents with relevant user data. Subsequently, he spent another 2.5 years at PayPal, leading the transformation of Paypal’s marketing technology platform. In his last role as SVP Engineering at Mastercard, he led their Connect Platform (marketplace of 180+ applications), overseeing a team of 180+ engineers across India, Dublin, and the U.S.
As a Tech Venture Partner at Gemba, Sahil plays a key role in the deal evaluation and post-investment portfolio support from a Technology perspective. Outside of work, Sahil enjoys singing and spending quality time with his two children, often playing cricket, badminton, and chess.
Dr. Puneet Gupta has over three decades of experience in strategy consulting, M&A, investment advisory and board advisory roles.
He has an extensive Governance and Advisory experience. With a primary focus on supporting management with strategic growth, human/financial capital, and corporate governance, he has served on the boards of major national institutions including UTI Pension Fund (~US$30B+ Pension fund asset manager in India) and NCDEX e Markets Ltd. He currently sits on the Board of Fusion Finance and also advises the Startup Fund of ONGC.
Mr. Gupta started his career as a consultant with Ernst & Young in Chicago. He then went on to hold leadership roles at SAP and ACL Services. He has also advised various pooled investment vehicles, Private Equity/ Venture Capital funds, conglomerates and family offices on their India and global investment strategy.
He is a TIE charter member and actively mentors entrepreneurs, delivers lectures on Private Equity & Venture Capital at leading academic institutions. Dr. Gupta holds a PhD from IIT (Delhi) and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.
Girish is a distinguished business leader with over 30 years of professional experience across P&L, Operations and Board Advisory roles.
As the Chief Executive Officer of the Impact Investors Council, he drives strategic initiatives and overall business in the areas of Policy, Partnerships and capital formation for impact creating businesses in India, notably in underserved sectors such as Health, Education, Agriculture, Livelihood, Climate, Financial Inclusion and Affordable Housing.
Previously, he was the Chairman & CEO for South Asia Agtech Hub for Innovation (a USAID firm) providing advisory and capital formation services to agritech startups.
He was also associated with Intellolabs as Group Executive Director and Yes Bank’s family office as Group Managing Director with focus on investments in Agri, Solar, Financial Services domains.
In his roles at Yes Bank, Olam, Dabur and Cargill, he held various leadership positions across Strategic Advisory and Research, Operations, Business and Sales functions. Girish brings a wealth of experience and strategic vision in complex domains such as Financial Services, Supply Chain, Sustainability and Agriculture.
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