Mr. Swarup is an industry professional with investment experience of more than 20 years in Private Equity and Venture Capital. He is the founder and chief mentor at Venture Gurukool, under his leadership Venture Gurukool has become one of the top early stage investor and mentoring platforms in India. Mr. Swarup was the Senior Investment Advisor to Siguler Guff, a large fund of funds and a private equity fund with over $10 billion in AUM. He advised them on their portfolio exit strategy. Mr. Swarup has also managed growth and a buyout SME fund in India and had AUM of approximately $365 million across three funds. As an industry pioneer, he founded Smile as one of the first digital Media and E-commerce Incubator where he helped build and scale many early stage ventures with very rewarding exits to strategic players like WPP, Yahoo, Dentsu etc. and the ventures had investments from Marquee Investors like Sequioa Capital, DST Global etc. He led private equity investments at Brand Capital and structured finance across various businesses in growth and expansion phase. He spearheaded investments in over 150 ventures in several industries viz. pharma and life sciences, manufacturing, engineering, media, consumer facing food and beverages, education and business services after deep understanding of Indian business, regulatory and financial and market environment. He also served as Managing Director and CEO at Times Internet, where as a leader he provided vision, strategy and organisation development for indiatimes.com, the leading portal in India and led the creation of multiple online assets, e-commerce, subscription services and mobile/voice value added services including timesofindia.com, economicstimes.com, indiatimes travel, indiatimes shopping and indiatimes 8888- the first ever mobile media VAS initiative with all mobile operators. He also led venture capital infusion into the organization by Sequoia Capital, this was their first investment in India at record valuation.
