The top 50: Arvind Purushotham, head, Citi Ventures
Arvind Purushotham leads Citi Ventures, the corporate venture capital unit of financial services provider Citi. He also serves as head of Citi Ventures, where he manages corporate venturing initiatives and invests in strategic deals.
Purushotham has been with Citi Ventures since the start of 2011, during which time the team has invested in over 100 companies. And in 2020, he helped Citi launch the Citi Impact Fund to back entrepreneurs in areas such as sustainability, workforce development, financial inclusion and social infrastructure. Notably, the fund has a mandate to back women and minority entrepreneurs – two groups which have traditionally found it difficult to access venture capital.
Citi Ventures’ own portfolio includes digital notary services provider Notarize, risk management software developer Feedzai, ticket and accommodation booking platform Hopper and identity verification software provider Socure. Among the unit’s most significant exits have been payments solution provider Square, which had its IPO in 2015, and DocuSign, an information processing company which made its debut on the Nasdaq exchange in 2018.
In the past year, Citi Ventures has backed ecommerce platform Cart.com in a venture round worth $240m as well as taken part in the $25m series B round for data analytics business Mostly AI.
Before joining Citi, Purushotham spent nearly a decade as a managing director at venture capital firm Menlo Ventures. Previously, he was a design engineer and a program manager at chipmaker Intel Corporation.
Purushotham obtained his bachelor and master of science in electrical engineering respectively from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and Case Western Reserve University, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
