Kalaari Capital

Growing up in a conservative middle class family in Hyderabad, I was one of only six women in my engineering class of four hundred. I just focused on the work in front of me. That focus took me to Silicon Valley, where I spent two decades building software companies from the ground up. After selling my second business, a solo trip to Hawaii helped me realize I had reached a natural plateau and wanted to stretch myself again. A visit to India shortly after made me see an undeniable energy in the country. I knew I had to leave my life in California to participate.

Rajesh Raju is a Managing Director at Kalaari Capital. He joined the firm in 2012 as a founding member of the rebranded Kalaari Capital, previously coming from Peepul Capital. He has over 10 years of financial services and investment leadership experience. He holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a degree from BITS Pilani. He led the close of Kalaari Capital Partners III ($290M) and is active across Fund IV investments.

Kumar Shiralagi is a co-founder and Venture Partner at Kalaari Capital. He previously served as Managing Director and co-founded the firm alongside Vani Kola. Before Kalaari/IUVP, he was Head of Intel Capital India and Country Director for Intel's India investments (2003–2007), with a track record of investments and exits in companies like NIIT, Subex, Tejas Networks, and Sharekhan. He co-founded Lytek Corporation in Arizona and worked at Motorola in technology development and corporate strategy. He holds a B.E. in Electronics and Communications from NIT Karnataka (formerly KREC).

Abhinav Shukla is the SEBI-designated contact person for Kalaari Capital Partners India IV at Kalaari Capital Advisors Private Limited, Bengaluru.

I have 28 years of professional experience and have been with Kalaari for nearly 12 years. I came into venture unexpectedly - I was thinking about building my own product company in India, and venture found me before I found it. Before that, I built products across startups and large enterprises. I started in engineering, moved into product management when I saw the gap between business requirements and what was being built, and eventually took full P&L ownership. The formative experience was a startup called Mod League, where I learned what it really means to build from scratch - setting up teams, selling to large enterprises, and navigating the hard realities of limited resources. At Oracle, I had the chance to see how structured product development works at scale, building enterprise products with beta customers from some of the world's largest pharma and manufacturing companies.