AAA Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars Awards 2016: Kiran Vasireddy

Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars Awards 2016: Kiran Vasireddy

Most corporate venturers try to align themselves with their independent VC peers to present an “entrepreneurs first” perspective.

When you are helping run the investments team for one of the fastest-growing India-based payments companies, though, you can negotiate extra. Kiran Vasireddy, investment professional of the One97 Mobility Fund and also senior vice-president and chief commercial officer of One97’s Paytm subsidiary, has done just that.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, co-founder and CEO of One97, said: “Kiran has been a true rock star in all the deals we have done. His negotiations skills are especially great. We, being a corporate investor, need rights beyond the capitalisation table spreadsheet. We need to build synergy with our core business.

“We were able to get better value in competing deals and could create tremendous shareholder value too.”

Recent deals devised by Vasireddy for One97 include a $10m investment in logistics technology developer LogiNext Solutions and another $10m in an automotive rickshaw hire service. He led the $50m financing round for consumer lifestyle marketplace Little. There are a dozen startups in his pipeline.

Paytm’s deal surge follows the mobile wallet firm raising money from a unit of China-based peer Alibaba Group, having exceeded the performance targets set by the investor for disbursal of funds.

E-commerce group Alibaba and its affiliate Ant Financial have invested about $680m in India-based online payment technology provider One97 Communications and will jointly hold a 40% stake, the Economic Times reported.

One97 had signed a term-sheet for investment with Singapore state-owned Temasek, as first reported by VCCircle, but opted instead for a deal with Alibaba.

Ant Financial, which oversees much of China-based Alibaba’s financial services offerings, paid a reported $575m for a 25% stake in One97 in February last year.

Alibaba’s latest investment included the outstanding $375m from the February deal and saw Ant’s stake lowered to 20%, while Alibaba’s share now also stands at 20%, according to a person familiar with the deal.

The share in One97 held by venture capital firm SAIF Partners was diluted from 37% to 30% in the transaction and Shekhar Sharma’s stake fell from 27% to 21%.

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