Neeraj Agrawal leads the Indian-origin venture capitalists in the list
Forbes business magazine has published the list of 100 best venture capitalists in the world and this time eleven Indian American investors made it to the Midas 2017 list.
Forbes, partnered with venture capital fund-of-funds TrueBridge Capital Partners, created the list using parameters including the first-day market capitalization of IPOs and the opinions of a panel of experts.
Sequoia veteran Jim Goetz retained his top position in the list with his 2014 WhatsApp deal and one of the early Uber investors, Chris Sacca of Lowercase came second in the list.
Battery Venture General Partner Neeraj Agrawal leads the Indian-origin venture capitalists in the list by getting featured in the 17th spot, followed by Accel Partners Sameer Gandhi, who clinched the 23rd spot.
Wing Venture Capital’s founding partner Asheem Chandna ranked 28th. Other Indian Americans that made it to the 100 are Salil Deshpande, Managing Director of Bain Capital Ventures(33); Aneel Bhusri, CEO and Cofounder of Workday (37); Gaurav Garg, Founding Partner of Wing Venture Capital (48); Promod Haque, Senior Managing Partner of Norwest Venture Partners (67); Hemant Taneja, Managing Director of General Catalyst Partners (70); Navin Chaddha, Managing Director of Mayfield Fund (73); Ravi Mhatre, Partner in Lightspeed Venture Partners (76); and Deven Parekh, Managing Director of Insight Venture Partners (99).
Neeraj Agrawal, who has been investing at Battery since 2000, is making it to the Midas List for the seventh consecutive time on the strength of his Saas investments. Two of his software companies, Coupa and Nutanix, went public in 2016 and another AppDynamic, was about to go public in early 2017 before it was scooped up by Cisco for $3.7 billion. Agrawal also serves on the boards of unicorn start-ups Sprinklr and Glassdoor.
Sameer Gandhi is one of six Accel investors in this year’s Midas List and has been a partner at the firm since 2008. He scored big last year when portfolio company jet.com was acquired by Walmart for $3.3 billion.
Asheem Chandna, who is the third Indian American in the top 30, co-led the Series A in AppDynamics in 2008 on behalf of top venture firm Greylock; in January of 2017. Cisco swooped in to acquire the app performance management company shortly before it was set to go public for $3.7 billion. That exit joins Palo Alto Networks, which went public in 2014, as well as more recent investments in Rubrik and Innovium.