In an effort to ramp up efforts in India, the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan (OTPP) has hired Darius Vakil from Goldman Sachs to lead venture investments in India, three people aware of the development said.
The private equity company is looking to build its own venture investment team focusing on late-stage venture and growth stage equity investment in tech companies.
This is the first hire for the firm in India for its venture play.
With more than 17 years of experience, Vakil is currently an executive director at Goldman Sachs’s private equity, merchant banking division. Before that, he has worked at General Atlantic and Gaja Capital, his social media profile shows.
When contacted, Vakil declined to comment. An emailed query to the spokesperson of OTPP did not elicit any response till press time.
Vakil will be part of the ‘Teachers Venture Growth’ initiative that has so far invested more than $8.5 billion across markets such as Americas, Europe and Asia. He will report to Kelvin Yu, a senior managing director at the firm who head the venture growth investing in Asia from Hong Kong.
The firm will look to back late-stage venture capital backed companies and growth-stage technology companies with cheques ranging anywhere between $50-250 million. Companies across consumer tech, enterprise tech and fintech will be the focus area for the firm, the second person aware of the OTPP’s plans said. “The strategy is to invest in Series B, C onwards in tech disruptors across various segment,” he added.
It will look at doing secondary as well as primary investments in companies. “The firm will look at leading or co-leading investments alongside its GP partners,” the third person said.
“The mandate for the new team will also be to build deeper GP relationships,” the first person cited above said. As a pension fund, OTPP invests in venture capital and private equity funds. So far in India it has invested across mid-market PE funds such as ChrysCapital and Kedaara Capital and in venture capital funds such as Sequoia Capital and Accel India.
“The team will look to back more funds from India going forward,” the person added.
India has become an increasingly important market for OTPP. Last week Mint reported Rahul Mukim’s appointment by the firm to help lead its private equity investing efforts. In September, OTPP said it had appointed an existing fund executive Deepak Dara as senior managing director and its India head, who is expected to take over in early 2023.
It has invested across asset classes such as infrastructure, private credit and private equity. In September, OTPP president Jo Taylor said in an interview that the firm is keen to expand its portfolio in India over the next 3-7 years and is looking at infrastructure, healthcare, credit and tech enabled businesses in India.
More recent investments include Mahindra Susten Pvt ltd, National Highways Infrastructure Trust, Daily Hunt parent Verse Innovations.
This move by OTPP is significant given that other global venture capital and tech investors have scaled down their investing efforts given the liquidity crunch in the market. At a time when funding slowdown has forced frothy valuations to settle down, companies with high growth potential are available at reasonable valuations, offering long term investors a good opportunity to back them.
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