Orios Sees Exit Of Two Managing Partners; Anup Jain, Rajeev Suri Step Down

Early stage investor Orios Venture Partners has seen two senior exits as managing partners Anup Jain and Rajeev Suri have stepped down to pursue other opportunities.

Both the outgoing managing partners took to LinkedIn to announce their respective exits. Incidentally, both Jain and Suri had joined Orios in 2018 as managing partners.

Jain said that he will be bringing ‘something new and exciting’ soon. “More on this in the coming weeks and months as the new conversations begin now!” said Jain. Meanwhile, Suri said in his post, “Creation excites, and I am moving on to create something exciting.”

While Jain held multiple positions across companies such as P&G, Yum Restaurants, Oriflame and Whirlpool, Suri held key roles at Jio, Viu and Infosys in his career. Some of their key investments have been BatterySmart, Kenko Beato, Nxtwave, Werize, Karbon, Varaha and Hypd.

Launched in 2014, Mumbai-headquartered Orios Venture Partners invests in startups at their early stages. Jain and Suri’s departures mean that the VC firm is left with Rehan Yar Khan as the sole managing partner.

The VC firm has backed some of the biggest names in India’s startup ecosystem, including Country Delight, ixigo, Mobikwik, PharmEasy and Zostel, among others. Orios’ last fund was in 2021, when it closed its Select Fund I at $30 Mn, set up for making follow-on investments in its portfolio startups. 

However, the firm also came under fire earlier this year due to financial irregularities surfacing at its portfolio startup GoMechanic, as the founders admitted to inflating their revenue. The whole controversy led to Orios writing down its investment in the startup.

The VC firm held a 17.14% stake in the startup at the time. “While our exposure from Fund II was 7.79% of the committed corpus, at the last round’s valuation, the assets represented around 1.27x of the fund’s multiple on invested capital (MOIC). We are writing down this value,” Orios had said at the time.

Further, the financial struggles of portfolio startup PharmEasy have also put Orios in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons. The epharmacy unicorn has been struggling with cash flow issues for a while now, due to its lending-driven approach to growth.

Jain and Suri’s exit from Orios comes as VCs step away from investment firms to launch their own ventures. Earlier this month, Rebright Partners’ general partner Brij Bhasin quit the VC firm to launch a new startup.