Former Paytm COO Kiran Vasireddy joins Kalaari Capital as partner

Former Paytm executive Kiran Vasireddy has joined venture capital firm Kalaari Capital after a one-and-a-half year sabbatical. Vasireddy had resigned from the Noida-based digital payments company in June 2019 where he was the chief operating officer. 

Vasireddy has confirmed to Entrackr that he joined Kalaari as a partner in January. Besides Vasireddy, Kalaari has also brought principals including Vamshi Reddy and Ravinder Singh, according to an ET report. 

The development comes at a time when Kaalari is all set to close its fourth fund in which Reliance Industries is in the final leg to invest $100 million and another $100 million in the next 12 months.

After his departure from Paytm where he served almost a decade, Vasireddy had become an angel investor. He is the second top-rung employee of Paytm who has chosen a career in the venture capital space. Earlier, Bhushan Patil, former president of Paytm, had started his own investment firm Multiply Ventures.

With the latest hirings, Kalaari is looking to bolster its top team as in the past two-three years, about a dozen top-level employees had moved on from the Bengaluru-based venture capital firm. The list includes Bala Srinivasa, Sumit Jain, Ashish Dave and Karteek Pulapaka among others. 

To fill the vacuum, Kalaari had onboarded Saurav Banerjee and Sreedhar Prasad as venture partners. It’s worth noting that Reliance, which has joined as a limited partner in Kalaari, has acquired four portfolio companies of the Vani Kola-led firm. These include Urban Ladder, Zivame, Embibe and Haptik.

Entrackr’s queries to Kalaari Capital didn’t elicit any immediate response.

Meanwhile, Reliance is also in late-stage talks with another Kalaari-backed startup Milkbasket for a potential acquisition. According to Entrackr’s sources, the grocery and milk delivery startup may get acquired by Reliance in a $40 million deal.

The talks between Milkbasket and Reliance resurfaced after Kalaari sold its stake to Mahendra Nahata-led MN Televentures. The transaction was reportedly resisted by Milkbakset’s CEO Anant Goel and other co-founders and stakeholders over Nahata’s close ties with Reliance.

Over the past couple of years, several entrepreneurs and top-level employees at large-scale startups have been gravitating towards the venture capital space for their new gigs. Former Urban Ladder co-founder Rajiv Srivatsa had joined Singapore-based early-stage VC firm Antler Global in June 2020 as a venture partner while GoJek’s Chief Technology Officer Ajey Gore had joined Sequoia Capital as an operating partner in August, last year.