Rajeev Mantri is the Founder and Managing Partner of Navam Capital. Prior to founding Navam Capital, Rajeev worked at the New York-based venture capital fund Lux Capital, focusing on investments in climate tech, biotech, and advanced materials. Rajeev has been a columnist on technology, venture capital, and entrepreneurship in India for Mint, Swarajya, India Today, The Wall Street Journal, Open Magazine, Times Of India, Financial Times, New York Times, BioSpectrum, The Economic Times, MIT Technology Review, and other leading publications. Rajeev is also the Co-Founder of the biopharma venture Vyome Therapeutics and served as Vyome’s president through the company’s formative years.

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Rajeev graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in materials science and engineering from Northwestern University and an MBA from Columbia Business School. He has been recognized as a Raisina Fellow by the Observer Research Foundation and attended King’s College London as a Chevening Fellow in Financial Services. In 2023, Rajeev was an Eisenhower Global Fellow in the prestigious Eisenhower Fellowships program.

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Dr. Anjan Ray is an Investment Partner with Navam. A chemistry graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, Anjan subsequently received his PhD in chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania under the guidance of Nobel Laureate Prof. Alan MacDiarmid. He then moved to the chemical industry and worked for over two decades across functions ranging from technical sales and servicing, quality control, R&D, and marketing to general management, M&A, and business strategy at corporations including ICI India Limited, Jubilant Group, and Honeywell UOP.

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In November 2016, Anjan shifted from private industry to research, joining the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research’s (CSIR) energy-focused research lab, Indian Institute of Petroleum (CSIR-IIP) in Dehradun as its eighth Director. As CSIR-IIP Director, Anjan led the development and first real-world demonstrations of sustainable aviation fuel-powered aircraft flights in India, forging key partnerships with leading Indian civil aviation players as well as the Indian Air Force to drive the adoption and scaling of indigenously developed sustainable fuels as part of the national strategy to develop self-reliance in energy. He held additional charge as Head of the Research, Project Planning, and Business Development Directorate at the CSIR headquarters in New Delhi from June 2017 to August 2018 and as Head of the Human Resource Development Group from March 2021 to February 2022.

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Apart from his professional career in materials, climate tech, chemicals, and energy technology, Anjan has had an active interest in heritage and environmental conservation for over three decades.

Dr. Shiladitya Sengupta is a Venture Advisor at Navam Capital. He is an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School and is also a member of the steering committee at the Regenerative Medicine Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, United States. Shiladitya has a long track record in biotech and life sciences entrepreneurship and is the Co-Founder of Cerulean Pharmaceuticals, Mitra Biotech, Vyome Therapeutics, and Alyssum Therapeutics. Shiladitya’s academic research focuses on the development of novel nanomedicine for cancer and angiogenesis-based diseases. In 2005, he was recognized as one of the top 35 innovators worldwide by MIT Technology Review magazine.

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He has also received the Era of Hope Scholar Award and the Innovator Collaborative Award from the U.S. Department of Defense, the Coulter Foundation Career Award, and the Shakuntala Amir Chand Award from the Indian Council for Medical Research. Shiladitya is an alumnus of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, where he received the Geeta Mital Gold Medal, and completed his PhD as a Nehru Scholar from Trinity College at Cambridge University in the UK, following which he was a Fellow at MIT before joining Harvard Medical School. Shiladitya has published over 35 peer-reviewed scientific papers, including in Nature and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and he is also listed as an inventor on several pending patents.

Tarun Mehta is a Venture Advisor with Navam. Tarun is the Co-Founder and CEO of electric vehicle pioneer Ather Energy and graduated from IIT Madras with a BTech/MTech dual degree in engineering design. At IIT Madras, Tarun was associated with various product development teams and was actively involved with the entrepreneurship ecosystem. He worked on more than a dozen hardware prototypes across a range of categories and has several patents pending as an inventor/co-inventor. After a brief stint at Ashok Leyland, Tarun co-founded Ather Energy in 2013 with Swapnil Jain.

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Ather, a pioneer of the electric vehicle industry in India, developed India’s first smart electric scooter and is an industry leader in the fast-growing electric vehicle market. Ather has the distinction of having developed its own vehicle platform from scratch, integrating hardware and software tightly to manufacture and sell electric 2-wheelers at scale. As CEO of Ather, Tarun drives the strategic thinking for the company while being closely involved with product development, engineering and manufacturing teams, and managing the product roadmap and vehicle development. Ather continues to pioneer new technologies and product designs in the electric vehicle sector, shaping key industry standards in vehicle charging, as well as working with government bodies and regulators to contribute to the industry’s policy and regulatory requirements and challenges.

Dr. Raghunath Anant Mashelkar is the chairman of the Investment Committee of the Fund. A distinguished Indian chemical engineer, Dr. Mashelkar served as the Director (1989–1995) of the National Chemical Laboratory, Pune, as well as the Director-General (1995–2006) of the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR), a nationwide group of publicly funded industrial research and development institutions in India. As CSIR DG, Dr. Mashelkar pioneered the initiative to out-license knowledge and know-how developed and duly patented by Indian research institutions to companies across the world based on modern knowledge from Indian laboratories, pioneering the trend of reverse transfer of technology. Dr. Mashelkar was recognized with the JRD Tata Corporate Leadership Award for leading the transformation of the CSIR organization into a dynamic research organization with capabilities for monetizing and commercializing its inventions. In 1998, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in London.

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He also successfully countered the patenting of traditional Indian knowledge by global corporations, establishing traditional knowledge as an intrinsic part of the country’s knowledge base, which would remain non-exclusive and freely available for use by anybody in the world.

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Dr. Mashelkar has been a leading advocate for innovation and R&D in corporate India and has served as an Independent Director on the boards of India’s leading companies, including Tata Motors, Godrej Agrovet, Reliance Industries, Piramal Enterprises, KPIT Technologies, and Thermax. He has also chaired the New Energy Council of Reliance Industries, which is tasked with formulating Reliance’s new energy and climate tech strategy.

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The Government of India’s trust and confidence in him is reflected in the constitution of over a dozen high-level Mashelkar Committees on various issues of science and technology policy. In 2014, Dr. Mashelkar was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, the second-highest civilian honour in India, by the President of India. He is an alumnus of the renowned Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai (formerly University Department of Chemical Technology, Mumbai University), whose alumni base includes several of the founders and owners of India’s leading industrial enterprises.

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