Former Uber Asia chief Amit Jain joins Sequoia

Amit Jain, former Asia Pacific head of ride-sharing platform Uber Technologies, has joined Sequoia Capital India as managing director to help grow the Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm’s investment interests across India and the south-east Asia region.

“Amit will be based out of our Singapore office. His addition to the team underscores our deep commitment to helping founders realise their dreams of building very large and enduring companies, many of whom will become key pillars of this region’s growth, prosperity and innovation,” Ravishankar G V, a managing director at Sequoia Capital, announced the development through a LinkedIn post.

In his last role, Jain led Uber’s operations in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Hong Kong, India and other markets. Prior to being the Asia Pacific head, he was promoted to the post of general manager for the APAC region, after four years of working with the San-Francisco based company.

An IIT-Delhi alumnus and an MBA from Stanford University, Jain served as president of Rent.com, an online listing venture for rental apartments, from 2013 to 2015. 

He has also held several executive positions at TPG Capital, Nexeo Solutions and McKinsey & Company.

In April this year, Rajan Anandan, formerly South East Asia and India vice president at Google, joined Sequoia Capital India as a managing director.

Anandan joined the team at Surge, Sequoia’s scale-up programme for startups by acting as an investment advisor and mentor to the founders.

Sequoia, which has invested in more than 130 startups in India including unicorns such as Ola, MuSigma and Zomato, had earlier this year announced that Surge would recruit 10 to 20 early-stage startups in two cohorts in a year and invest $1.5 million in each of them at an early stage of the programme.