Lightspeed has been actively investing in India since 2008. In 2015, seeing the tremendous growth in the India technology opportunity, Lightspeed India raised a new India-dedicated fund with a corpus of $135 million. Globally, Lightspeed is investing out of Lightspeed X, a $635 million early-stage fund, and Lightspeed Select, a $430 million expansion capital fund, and has $4 billion of committed capital.
We are building a small and cohesive team of experienced investors, most with several entrepreneurial or founder experiences under their belt. We want to be there when founders face forks in the road and we know what it is like to build and scale companies. We bring a strong customer perspective to the table and have a passion to support entrepreneurs and help drive impact and scale.
To address this growing technology opportunity, we embarked earlier this year on a mission to expand our team. We wanted to add a senior professional who could not only increase the bandwidth of our team to look at new opportunities, but also add strong in-market operating experience and provide experience-based insights to our family of companies.
So we went looking especially carefully at Internet industry professionals — one of the most encouraging trends we have seen over the past few years is the broadening and deepening of the talent pool in India whether it be an increasing number of repeat entrepreneurs or repeat startup professionals with functional expertise in areas like product management, design, growth and marketing — areas where India was previously deemed to be under-resourced.
We are fortunate to have someone join our team who embodies this deepening of the talent pool in India, especially in the area of product and technology. We are excited to welcome Harsha Kumar to Lightspeed India as Principal, looking at consumer and B2B opportunities.
Harsha is a passionate product person and understands that product and great experiences, coupled with a data-driven approach to decision-making, drive companies to greatness. We think her judgment in joining Ola and Zynga is indicative of identifying great opportunities early. She comes to Lightspeed India with 11 years of experience in technology and product management at many top organizations.
Harsha was most recently AVP Product at Olacabs, leading a 40-person team and driving design and growth for several products there. During her time at Olacabs, Olacabs’ service went through hypergrowth, scaling from 3000 bookings per day to a million bookings per day. In doing so, Harsha and her team had to build out multiple products to address bookings growth, infrastructure scalability, payments and support while appealing to multiple audiences — consumers, corporate customers and drivers. Prior to Olacabs, Harsha led product for Adnear, an advertising technology company, and managed DAU and revenue for Cafe World and Mafia Wars, two of Zynga’s flagship games. Prior to Zynga, Harsha spent six years at Persistent Systems as an engineer and product lead. Harsha received an MBA from INSEAD and an undergraduate degree in Computer Science Engineering from Cummins College of Engineering in Pune.
Welcome, Harsha!
– Bejul & Dev
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