Pankaj Mitra has been appointed as a Partner in the India business of global venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners, which specializes in investments in cybersecurity, enterprise technology, and artificial intelligence, the investment firm announced.

Mitra has over 25 years of experience in the investment and technology industries.

He comes to Bessemer from Cisco's corporate development team, where he oversaw M&A and investments for the company's operations in India and its global Customer Experiences portfolio.

Among his noteworthy investments are digital adoption platform Whatfix, contact center AI company Uniphore, and AI observability platform Fiddler.

Before joining Cisco, Mitra was a member of the original team behind Infosys' $500 million innovation fund, which made investments in firms including Whoop and Ideaforge.

“Pankaj brings a unique blend of investment acumen and deep industry knowledge. His experience will be invaluable as we deepen our focus on AI, enterprise-tech, and cybersecurity in India,” says Vishal Gupta, Partner, Bessemer.

“The ongoing AI platform shift offers a once in a generation opportunity for builders to usher in the next wave of tech evolution across industries”.

“With its stellar track record, Bessemer is poised to partner with this new generation of ambitious, world-class founders in India addressing pain points domestically and globally, and I'm excited to be part of this journey,” adds Mitra.

He served as a consultant for Deloitte earlier in his career and assisted in the launch of VMware's initial cloud services.

Mitra is an IIT Kharagpur alumnus who also has an MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.

Bessemer supports entrepreneurs from their infancy through all phases of development, having backed more than 145 initial public offerings (IPOs) and 300 portfolio businesses in the consumer, healthcare, and enterprise sectors.

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The venture capital firm Bessemer has more than $18 billion in assets under management, and its global portfolio includes companies including ServiceTitan, Pinterest, Shopify, Twilio, Yelp, LinkedIn, PagerDuty, DocuSign, Wix, Fiverr, and Toast. Tel Aviv, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, New York, London, Hong Kong, Boston, and Bengaluru are among the locations where the company maintains operations.