Ramneek Gupta, founder and managing partner at venture capital firm PruVen Capital, has unveiled an independent venture and growth equity platform backed by US-based financial services provider Prudential Financial.
PruVen’s first fund is a $300m multi-stage investment vehicle focused on areas including insurance, financial, property, health and enterprise technology.
Gupta’s first hires are Victoria Cheng, a former Citi Ventures director who started the $200m Citi Impact Fund and a GCV Rising Stars awardee in 2018, and Rohit Ramkumar, former partnerships manager at corporate credit card provider Brex.
Prior to founding PruVen in the summer, Gupta was co-head of global venture investing at Citi Ventures, the corporate venturing arm of US-listed bank Citi.
At Citi Ventures, Gupta led investments in more than 25 companies including Square (listed on NYSE), Jet.com (acquired by Walmart for $3.3bn), DocuSign (listed on Nasdaq), Honey (acquired by Paypal for $4bn), Grab, Datarobot, Feedzai, Homelight, Udaan and Ujet.
Prior to Citi Ventures, Gupta had led business development at local marketing platform Zappedy, which was acquired by Groupon; was a partner at VC firm Battery Ventures where he took part in its expansion into India; and held product development roles at PMC Sierra and TiVo.
Gupta’s angel investments include commission-free retail brokerage Robinhood, automated background check provider CheckR, online beauty community Ipsy, artificial intelligence developer Vicarious and voice analytics technology provider Gridspace, he said.
