Jungle Ventures ropes in former TPG Growth executive David Gowdey as managing partner

Singapore-based early stage investor Jungle Ventures, known for its active investment practice in India, has appointed former TPG Growth executive David Gowdey as a managing partner, as per a press statement.

With this, the company will have a team of four managing partners led by co-founders, Anurag Srivastava and Amit Anand as well as Jayesh Parekh, co-founder of Sony Entertainment Television India, who joined the firm in 2013.

"I believe there is currently a tremendous opportunity to build a world-class venture capital platform and create something quite unique in the Asia Pacific region. Jungle, with its focus on being a truly value-added investor, has set themselves apart from other funds and I am excited to be joining the team," said Gowdey, who holds an MBA from Macquarie Graduate School of Management.

Gowdey, who has over 16 years of experience in investing and working with internet companies in both mature and emerging markets, will be based in Singapore, where he will help lead Series A and B stage investments of the firm with a focus on the consumer internet sector, the statement said.

He had worked at Yahoo! for 12 years as head of International M&A. Later, he launched a venture capital fund called Xplorer Capital which was focused on internet investments across the emerging markets. In 2012, Gowdey joined TPG Growth, the growth equity investment unit of global PE giant TPG.

He will continue to represent his former company as a member of the board of directors of PropertyGuru, the largest online real estate portal in Southeast Asia.

"David has been covering the internet and technology space in South Asia for over 16 years and has a well developed network, which will assist Jungle in sourcing unique and proprietary investment opportunities," said Anurag Srivastava, co-founder and managing partner Jungle Ventures.

Recently, the company had appointed Tata Sons' chairman emeritus Ratan Tata as special adviser. Tata joined the likes of Gokul Rajaram (product engineering lead at Square), Lim Dershing (founder of JobsCentral), Alon Sobol (director of ISP/telco Relationships for Spotify) and others who are presently advisers to Jungle.

Jungle Ventures had launched a $10 million seed-to-early stage fund in 2012. It is currently raising a second fund with a much bigger corpus.

Since January this year, Jungle Ventures has made several investments including Commeasure Solution India Pvt Ltd, which runs a B2B platform helping hotels develop their direct booking systems and Social Audience Pvt Ltd, a company behind the data intelligence startup Tookitaki.

It also has positions in Zipdial (recently acquired by Twitter), LiveSpace, Tradegecko, CrayonData, Fastacash and travelmob (acquired by Nasdaq-listed HomeAway).

Last week, it backed Mobikon Asia Pte Ltd, a digital marketing startup located in India and Singapore and offering a customer engagement platform for QSR, restaurants and food chain. Mobikon is planning to use the funding to augment its presence in markets like India, Manila, Singapore and Dubai.