Bessemer Adds Pankaj Mitra as Partner to Lead India Tech Investments

Bessemer Venture Partners announced the appointment of Pankaj Mitra as Partner in its India practice. The tech industry veteran will focus primarily on investments in enterprise tech, AI, and cybersecurity. 

With more than 25 years of experience, Pankaj joins Bessemer from Cisco’s corporate development team, where for the past seven years he led investments and M&A activity for its global Customer Experiences portfolio as well as for India. Some of his investments include Fiddler (AI observability), Uniphore (contact center AI), and Whatfix (digital adoption). He has also worked at Infosys in a similar capacity and was part of the founding team for its $500 million innovation fund. His investments at Infosys included Ideaforge (NSE: IDEAFORGE) and Whoop. Earlier in his career, Pankaj helped launch VMware's first cloud services as a product manager and was also a management consultant at Deloitte.

An Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur alumnus, Pankaj also holds an MBA from UC Berkeley Haas School of Business.

Commenting on the appointment, Vishal Gupta, Partner, said “We are delighted to welcome Pankaj to the Bessemer family. Pankaj brings a breadth of experience which is a unique blend of investing prowess as well as deep industry knowledge. This will be invaluable as we look to deepen our commitments in AI, enterprise-tech, and cybersecurity in India.”

Pankaj himself commented, “I am thrilled to join Bessemer at this pivotal time.  The ongoing AI platform shift offers a once in a generation opportunity for builders to usher in the next wave of tech evolution across industries.  With its stellar track record, Bessemer is poised to partner with this new generation of ambitious, world-class founders in India addressing pain points domestically and globally, and I'm excited to be part of this journey.” 

Bessemer has been active in India for the past two decades. The firm’s legacy investments include Mediassist, Perfios, Swiggy, Urban Company, among others. Some of its more recent partnerships have been with Boldfit, Easebuzz, Protectt, Shopdeck and more. Bessemer announced its second India fund with $350 million of capital in March this year with a focus on AI, fintech, enterprise-tech, digital health, consumer, and cybersecurity.