Bessemer Venture Partners promotes Anant Vidur Puri to Partner

At Bessemer, we believe founders can build anywhere, and the technologies and businesses that shape the way we live, work, and connect can serve and be developed in markets around the world. With this mission in mind, we celebrate Anant Vidur Puri’s promotion to Partner and his continued dedication to the firm’s investment practice in Bangalore, where he continues to build long-standing relationships with founders within the Indian startup ecosystem.

“Anant has played an instrumental role in sourcing breakout successes including consumer internet leaders, Swiggy and UrbanCompany, two portfolio companies which are now worth $6 billion and $2.1 billion, respectively,” shares Vishal Gupta, Partner at Bessemer. “As he digs more into India’s Global SaaS roadmap, we look forward to seeing his future contributions to the firm.”

“Across different verticals and geographies, cloud connectivity continues to take over software at unprecedented rates, and the rise of mobile ubiquity in India poses opportunities to change the way people connect and conduct business,” shares Jeremy Levine, Partner at Bessemer. “In his time at the firm, Anant has demonstrated his ability and ambition to discover those unique upstarts and help founders develop throughout different phases of growth.”

Today, Anant serves on the boards for Cashify and Remedinet, and as an adept investor across both consumer and enterprise SaaS, he is also a board observer for MyGlamm, Lentra, LivSpace, DocsApp, and Pharmeasy.

“In the past decade, 700 million people in India came online, and about 100 million of them transact online today. However, the opportunity ahead of us is even more massive — five to 10 times larger as we predict 500 million more people will engage and transact online in the next 10 years leading to a trillion-dollar digital economy,” Anant shares. “What this means is that there’s a huge appetite for new solutions across SaaS and Consumer that serve new demographics within the Indian market, including women, children, elderly people, and residents from different socio-economic backgrounds that speak vernacular languages. I look forward to working with ambitious founders who want to play a role in making technology in India more diverse and accessible as these audiences shift online.”

"There’s an appetite for new solutions that serve more demographics in India."

In his first stint with the firm, Anant joined Bessemer as an Analyst in 2014 where he focused on Consumer Internet Roadmap sourcing deals with category leaders in online gig economy marketplaces. Then, after graduating from Harvard Business School in 2018, Anant returned to Bessemer, where he continued his focus on the consumer internet roadmap, in addition to furthering the firm’s efforts on India’s Global SaaS roadmap. Today he partners closely with early-stage founders providing strategic counsel as they find product-market fit, gain traction, and scale into market leaders.

“The two pieces of advice I always share with entrepreneurs are simple — hire the best people you can find and build for your customers, not your investors. The only way to build a sustainable business is to create value through a great product and customer experience.”