General Partners
- Subrata Mitra
Prior to launching the Erasmic Venture Fund (EVF) in 2006, Subrata & his partner, Prashanth Prakash, co-founded Erasmic Consulting to work with, mentor & invest their personal time & capital into early stage US/India cross-border companies. Subrata was the Chairman of Small-device (), now a part of Digital Chocolate (). He’s also on the board of Mu Sigma (), a statistical modeling and Analytics company with huge customer traction across multiple verticals.
Prior to Erasmic, Subrata was MD, India, for Tavant Technologies, Inc., () a US based Mortgage Solutions Company. Subrata was instrumental in building Tavant’s India center from 0 to 350 in the space of 18 month, providing operational support such as recruitment and training on one side, and delivering cutting edge solutions for Tavant's customers in the Manufacturing and Mortgaging Sectors, on the other. Tavant was acquired by privately held S. CAL based Ameriquest Mortgage Capital in 2004 (now a part of CitiCapital), primarily on the basis of their strong center of delivery excellence from India.
Previously, Subrata was the founder and VP of Engineering, Firewhite, Inc., a developer of Enterprise-class infrastructure solution designed to remotely & wirelessly manage mobile applications & data on small-format devices such as those running Palm-OS or Pocket PC or Blackberry. In 2002, Firewhite was acquired by Ubiquio, Inc., which, in turn merged into Mobile Planet, later that year. Previously, he worked at IBM's prestigious T.J. Watson and Santa Teresa Labs; at the latter he served as a lead architect for IBM's OOAD tool, called Dynamic Designer.
Subrata holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and is the author of 10 successful patent applications & numerous Journal and Conference publications. Subrata holds a B.Tech. in Computer Science degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India; he was the winner of the Best Undergraduate Project for the graduating class on 1988.
- Prashanth Prakash
Prashanth has over 16 years of experience in information technology, Internet product development and consulting services.
He started his full-time career at S3 Technologies a division of GSE systems. Working for them in various capacities he led a team that was responsible for building the next generation Case Tools for real-time simulations (GemCase). Prashanth also widely consulted for various companies in the US before moving to Bangalore to setup NetKraft in 1998.
As Founder/CEO of NetKraft he helped define both the Vision and Strategic direction for NetKraft to establish it as one of the leading Offshore solutions company focusing on the Retail and HealthCare Verticals. In 2004, NetKraft had 400+ employees with offices in US, France, UK and Belgium, when it was acquired by Texas based Adea Systems. Previously, Prashanth secured two rounds of Venture Funding for NetKraft, from funds based both in Europe and US.
He holds a Masters degree in Computer Science from the University of Delaware, USA, and an Undergraduate degree, also in Computer Science, from the Bangalore Institute of Technology, India.
- Mahendran Balachandran
Mahendran has over 17 years of experience in the IT industry and was most recently the Country Manager of Apple Computers in India. He was instrumental in establishing a strong channel & retail presence for Apple as well as their success in the Video and corporate segments. Under his leadership, the Indian operations became a high growth and profitable subsidiary of Apple in Asia Pacific.
Mahendran previously served as the COO of CoSystems Inc. a San Jose based telecom and datacom solutions company. As a part of the CoSystems worldwide management team, he was responsible for the entire operations in Asia Pacific including Engineering, Sales & Marketing, HR, Finance and Strategic Planning. In this capacity, his focus was on financial restructuring and streamlining of the Indian operations while visioning strategic partnerships and programs for growth. He ramped up the product engineering team from 15 to 80 people in 6 months and set up their VOIP team.
Mahendran spent over 8 years with Tektronix Ltd., where as a part of the Country management team he headed the Sales, Strategy and Marketing and led many successful growth initiatives for their Test & Measurements, Video and Color Printing divisions.
With a Post Graduate management in Finance & Marketing from IIM Bangalore and B.Tech from REC Warangal, Mahendran's professional strengths are Business strategy, General Management and sales management backed by significant expertise in Finance and Technology.
- Gagan Kumar
Most Recently Gagan has been involved in managing the offshore operations for Mu Sigma () which is a Decision Sciences Company, Headquartered out of Schaumburg, Illinois. Mu Sigma provides Cutting-edge solutions in Marketing, Risk and Supply Chain Analytics to leading North American Fortune-500 Corporations in verticals such as Financial Services (Banking and Insurance), Technology, Retail, Pharmaceutical and Services Industry.
Apart from managing the operations at the offshore Analytics center, Gagan has been instrumental in defining and setting up delivery processes and project management methodologies at Mu Sigma.
Prior to Mu Sigma Gagan worked at Accenture Services Pvt. Ltd., as a Delivery Unit Lead. At Accenture Gagan was dedicated to managing offshore delivery, for a total team size ranging between 250-500.
He has also contributed to development of capabilities and delivery frameworks around Project Management Maturity, Application Outsourcing and Service Transition.
Gagan spent 5 years in the US and was responsible for setting up Trigyn's operations in Singapore upon his return in 2002.
Gagan had started his career with NIIT and moved on to work with Wipro, managing large scale implementations for GE Medical Systems Asia, across Asia-Pacific.
He graduated from IIT Kanpur, majoring in Electrical Engg. in 1988 and completed his MBA from IIM Bangalore in 1992.
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