Pranay Desai
Managing Director at Z47 (fka Matrix Partners India)
Bengaluru, Karnataka
Overview
Work Experience
Managing Director
2021 - Current
I lead B2B Software investments at Z47 (fka Matrix Partners India). If you are working on an idea, drop me a message! Z47 has been backing ambitious founders since 2006, building for India and for the globe. We have invested $1.5 Billion and invest in early-stage businesses (seed to series B) and have backed companies like Ola, Razorpay, Dailyhunt, Ofbusiness, OneCard and MoEngage. I invest in AI applications, vertical software, and developer tools and have invested in and/or supported the following: Moengage, Toddle, Rocketlane, 100ms, Murf AI, Atomicwork, Sifthub, Greylabs AI, and one in stealth.
Investor
2024
Investor
2023
SiftHub is a knowledge discovery and content generation platform for sales and pre-sales teams.
Raised $5,500,000.00 from Andrew Johnston, Z47, Manish Jindal, Shashank Kumar, Arvind Parthiban, Neon Fund, Harshil Mathur, Mars Shot Ventures and Blume Ventures.
Investor
2022
Atomicwork provides modern service management and conversational ITSM software.
Raised $14,000,000.00 from Neon Fund, Storm Ventures, Blume Ventures, Z47, Storm Ventures, Z47, Blume Ventures and Neon Fund.
Investor
2022
Murf AI is a synthetic speech technology startup developing lifelike AI voices for podcasts, slideshows, and professional presentations.
Raised $11,500,000.00 from Ajay Arora, Yamini Bhat, Z47, Pushkar Mukewar, Ashwini Asokan, Ankit Bhati and Elevation Capital.
Investor
2022
100ms is a live-video infrastructure startup that allows developers to build and deploy enterprise-class video applications in hours.
Raised $24,500,000.00 from Accel, Z47, STRIVE, Alpha Wave Incubation, Cloud Capital and LocalGlobe.
Investor
2021
Rocketlane is a project management and collaboration platform that enhances the customer onboarding processes for businesses.
Raised $45,000,000.00 from 8i Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, Z47 and 8VC.
Investor
2021
MoEngage is an internet company that features cloud-based marketing services for consumer businesses.
Raised $209,969,926.00 from Eight Roads Ventures, B Capital, Z47, Multiples, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Amicus Capital and Steadview Capital.
Investor
2021
Director, Growth Marketing
2019 - 2021
Led a team of 40+ marketing and creative professionals and owned revenue-focused marketing objectives for our customer service products.
Head of Enterprise Marketing
2018 - 2019
Led the 20-member global enterprise marketing team at Freshworks. Supported 150% YoY growth of the enterprise business.
CEO's office
2014 - 2017
As the first member of the CEO's office, I worked on new initiatives and org building. - Setup sales operations and international sales offices - M&A - Acquired 9 companies - 1click, Konotor, Frilp, Framebench, Chatimity, Airwoot, Pipemonk, JoeHukum, Mobiopush - Investor relations and fundraising - $50M USD in 2015, and $55M USD in 2016 from Sequoia, Accel, Tiger Global and Google Capital
Freshworks is building and delivering online cloud-based software-as-a-service that provides helpdesk support with automation solutions.
Raised $483,999,930.00 from Steadview Capital.