TDK Corporation (TSE: 6762) announced that subsidiary TDK Ventures, Inc. has named its Investment Team for its recently opened India office. Ravi Jain will lead the corporate venture capital firm’s regional India investments, and Vasan Churchill will drive investment analysis. The two, both born in the country, will work out of the company’s innovation hub in Bengaluru. Their focus will be on providing Indian entrepreneurs the opportunity to accelerate the development of their innovative technologies and solutions beyond India, leveraging TDK Ventures’ experience in scaling global deep-tech startups worldwide.
“Investing in and being present in India, alongside phenomenal startups addressing these critical challenges, enables us to take a meaningful step toward uniting global innovators and providing them with the support needed to drive real change—a win for everyone.”
TDK Ventures Bengaluru innovation hub office is its first expansion outside the U.S. “This move reflects a shift to bring investors to entrepreneurs, rather than the other way around,” TDK Ventures President Nicolas Sauvage noted. “By situating TDK Ventures closer to India’s visionary startups and innovators, the goal is to offer TDK Goodness firsthand, accelerating the development of transformative technologies that can benefit the global ecosystem.”
“We are so excited to welcome Ravi and Vasan to join and represent TDK Ventures.” commented Nicolas Sauvage. “Ravi is known and respected as both an investor and entrepreneur, while Vasan’s international experience in entrepreneurship and education have given him a broad perspective on various professional cultures. I have confidence that together, they will find and invest in India’s best deep-tech entrepreneurs and help them grow and scale.”
Over the past three years, Ravi Jain has had various leadership positions with the Ola Group, including within Ola Consumer, Ola Electric and Ola Krutrim. Ravi led the pre-owned cars business, ‘Ola Cars’ within Ola Consumer and setup and led Aftersales within Ola Electric. He also led the strategy function for the Ola Group. Most recently he was involved in leading business and strategy at Krutrim, India’s AI unicorn.
He also co-founded GenY Medium and GenY Labs, performance marketing technology and services company. GenY Labs created Auris, a Natural Language Understanding (NLU)-based consumer insights platform.
He has also served six years as a Principal Investment Manager at VenturEast in Hyderabad, India, where he actively managed investments in seven portfolio companies in the cleantech and healthcare space.
Ravi earned a Post Graduate Program in Management specializing in Finance and Strategy at the Indian School of Business, and earned his Dual degree (B. Tech., M. Tech.) in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, where he stood first in his class.
Vasan Churchill joined TDK Ventures after spending three years at ADAXIS, a company he co-founded in the field of robotic additive-manufacturing software, where he led business development efforts and nurtured his passion for startups, business, and finance. Prior to that, he worked as a senior scientist at RISE (Research Institutes of Sweden), where he led a variety of projects in the areas of materials and manufacturing. Before RISE, Vasan worked in GE Global research in wind and aviation domains. Vasan holds two patents granted in wind turbine blades. He has a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and three peer-reviewed publications. He was born and raised in Madurai, India, and has worked in the USA, India, and Sweden. He is fluent in Tamil, Hindi, and Swedish as well as English.
“TDK Ventures entered the Indian market with a mission to accelerate learning, bring meaningful contributions to society, and invest in startups with similar ideals,” said Anil Achyuta, TDK Ventures Investment Managing Director. “Investing in and being present in India, alongside phenomenal startups addressing these critical challenges, enables us to take a meaningful step toward uniting global innovators and providing them with the support needed to drive real change—a win for everyone.”
