ET Startup Awards 2023: Jishnu Bhattacharjee bags Midas Touch award for best investor

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Arriving at a decision was difficult in the backdrop of a year which has been fraught with challenges for the venture capital industry as valuations and fundraising saw a major hit. Exits became scarce and the IPO market dried up.

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After a lengthy deliberation, the jury bottled down on Fireside Ventures’ founder Kanwaljit Singh and Nexus Venture Partners’ Jishnu Bhattacharjee.

While Singh has been a pioneer in the consumer investing space making early bets on direct-to-consumer (D2C) startups much before the segment became buzzy, Bhattacharjee has emerged as one of the most prominent VCs specialising in cross-border SaaS (software-as-a-service) companies.

The jury finally zeroed in on Silicon Valley-based Bhattacharjee for his consistent track record of portfolio exits through acquisitions.

During this 15-year investing career, Bhattacharjee has clocked over 15 exits in his portfolio, including Citrix’s acquisition by Cloud.com, American Express’ buyout of Mezi, and Gluster’s sale to Redhat. His other unrealised gains sit with companies like Postman, an application programming interface (API) management startup valued at $5.6billion, and Druva, a software company providing data protection and management valued at over $2 billion.

“Receiving the Midas Touch award is an honour for me and the entire Nexus team. This is a recognition of our work