Arka in Sanskrit mean Sun Beam, which represents the guiding light we provide to startups from India.
Arka Venture Labs is an early stage cross-border accelerator fund enabling "Indian B2B tech-startups to scale up globally" with capital, mentoring and in-depth access to both Silicon Valley & Indian start-up eco-systems.
Eric Benhamou has over 40 years of experience in the IT industry, including 14 years of active venture capital experience. He founded Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV) in 2003 and made active investments in early stage information technology Silicon Valley firms focused on global enterprise and telecommunications markets. In fund I, he leads investments in Swan Labs (F5), Dasient (TWTR), Voltaire(MLNX), Finjan(FNJN), Contextream (HP) and Load Dynamix. Eric currently serves on the boards of Grid Dynamics, Ayehu, Totango, Secret Double Octopus and 6d bytes, portfolio companies of BGV’s fund II and III.
Prior to his venture capital career, Eric Benhamou built and operated several IT companies and experienced all the stages of growth from start-up to Global Fortune 500. Principally, he served as CEO of 3Com from 1990 to 2000 and as Chairman until 2010 and also served as CEO of Palm until 2003, and subsequently as Chairman of the Board. Both 3Com and Palm were sold to HP in 2010.
Sanjay Nath
Managing Partner, Blume Ventures
Sanjay Nath is the co-founder and Managing Partner at Blume Ventures, one of India’s leading early stage Venture funds.
Blume focuses on seed to Pre-Series A stages of funding and has made over a 100 investments across its 7 year history. Sanjay’s stints at Sun Microsystems, PwC Consulting, IBM Global Services, Loxodrome (a knowledge process outsourcing company he co founded), and Mumbai Angels have given him a breadth of experience across the US and India in Management Consulting, Strategy & Marketing, Technology and Angel Investing. He is an alumni of BITS Pilani and UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management.
At Blume, Sanjay advises and works closely with some of the leading investments at the firm – Grey Orange Robotics, Locus, Tricog, Dataweave, Little Black Book, THB (The Healthy Billions), amongst other emerging stars. He also heads Platform Initiatives, managing relationships with investors, the ecosystem at large, and partnerships – one of the most recent being the Draper Venture Network (DVN).
Ankur Jain
Managing Partner, Emergent Ventures
Ankur is co-founder of Emergent Ventures. Previously, Ankur was a venture investor at Nexus Venture Partners investing in US and India. Prior to that, Ankur was venture investor at Blumberg Capital investing in US and Israel. Prior to that, Ankur did strategy consulting at Accenture across a range of verticals including healthcare, financial services and technology. Earlier, Ankur led product teams at Andiamo Systems and later Cisco which acquired Andiamo in 2004. Ankur’s selected investments include Mertado (acquired by Groupon), Cyvera (acquired by Palo Alto Networks), Mobsmith (acquired by Rubicon Project), BringIT (acquired by International Gaming Technologies) and Arkin (acquired by VMWare).
Ankur holds a Bachelors in in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Delhi, a Masters in Computer Science from UCLA, and an MBA in Management from the Wharton School where he graduated as a Palmer Scholar. Ankur is also a co-inventor for five technology patents. Ankur is Chair for TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs) San Francisco.
