Kartik Jaishankar

As the Founder of Valence Growth Partners, my vision is to enable businesses to unlock growth by creating long-lasting bonds. Before this, I was part of the global investing team at Omidyar Network, where I sourced, evaluated and invested in ventures across FinTech, SaaS, Blockchain and Digital Infrastructure. I also helped drive Omidyar's efforts towards fostering innovation by creating a platform in partnership with CIIE.CO (a start-up incubator established by IIM Ahmedabad) to incubate and accelerate entrepreneurship in India. During my time at The London School of Economics, I led their in-house consulting arm to help start-ups chart their zero-to-one journeys – from assessing product-market-fit to developing a go-to-market strategy. Among them was Circuit Mind, an AI-enabled circuit board design company, which was recognised and funded by Google for Start-ups as the most impactful companies in Europe led by black founders. The entrepreneurial bug bit well before any of this, when I was part of building India’s first D2C artisanal ice-cream brand. Several roadblocks, pivots, and iterations later - I learnt why ideas are a dime a dozen and it's the execution that counts. My core values remain agility, grit and humility.