Iron Pillar Announces Team Expansion
Bangalore, July 07, 2021: Iron Pillar, a leading venture growth investor, today announced the appointment of Adil Allana, Supervisory Board member of the Allana Group, as a Board Partner. Iron Pillar also added three senior professionals to its investment team. Sajid Fazal bhoy, previously with Blume Ventures, joined Iron Pillar as a Partner. Pavan Gupte with more than twenty years of alternative investment experience with firms like CVCI, KKR, and Hermes GPE has joined as a Board Partner. Rahul Garg, previously with Kalaari Capital and Lehman Brothers, has joined as Principal.
Allana Group also invested $10M in Iron Pillar’s Fund II. The 150 years old Group has manufacturing and distribution in 20 countries and has market leadership in oils, proteins, several FMCG brands, and Agri products. In 2017, the Group set up a corporate venture arm and has since made investments in e-commerce, grocery products, challenger brands, media, and healthcare. The Group specializes in consumer industries with a strong focus on ASEAN, MENA, and India.
Anand Prasanna, Managing Partner, Iron Pillar said, “We are excited to welcome these outstanding professionals with proven track records of operational excellence at growth-stage companies to our expanding team. Their collective knowledge & experience will add tremendous value to our portfolio companies. For example, we have an existing relationship with Adil and Allana Group through their investment in FreshToHome, where they have added significant value to the company in operations and international expansion. This is the logical next step for us to take our fruitful partnership forward to support many more of our portfolio companies. As we continue to build Iron Pillar, we look forward to collaborating with more large Indian and global business groups who can help our portfolio companies improve their operations and expand across the US, Middle East, and the Asia Pacific.”
Iron Pillar’s portfolio includes technology companies like Uniphore, FreshtoHome, Servify, and CoreStack that are built from India for Indian and global markets. In 2020, Iron Pillar has also set up ‘Iron Pillar Network’, a stellar line up of senior technology executives from companies/institutions like Amazon, Bertelsman, Careem, Cloudera, Discord, Google, Intertrust, JLL, McGraw Hill, Optum, SAP, Snowflake, SRI, UPenn, University of Utah, Zoho, etc to help its portfolio companies expand globally.