Naren Gupta

Naren Gupta, a venture capitalist who co-founded Nexus Venture Partners to help plant Indian SaaS startups on the world map, died on Saturday December 25 2021. He was 73. Gupta, who moved to the U.S. to pursue higher education in late 1960s, co-founded Integrated Systems, a software firm that was ultimately sold to Intel. After leaving the firm, he began to explore investment opportunities. Nexus Venture Partners, the firm he co-founded in 2006, today operates over $2 billion assets under management. The fund has backed several promising startups including API platform Postman, online classifieds platform Olx, coding platform WhiteHat Jr, and edtech Unacademy. Gupta also served as a chairman of the board of Red Hat prior to the firm’s acquisition by IBM. Gupta was named to the Caltech Board of Trustees in 2011. Gupta was born on September 30, 1948. He received a BTech in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Delhi in 1969, an MS in aeronautics from Caltech in 1970, and a PhD in applied mechanics from Stanford University in 1974. In 1980, Gupta co-founded Integrated Systems Inc. (ISI), an embedded software company that he took public in 1990. He served as the company’s president and chief executive officer (CEO) until 1994 and as its chairman until 2000. After ISI merged with Wind River Systems in 2000, Gupta served as Wind River’s vice chairman as well as the company’s interim president/CEO. In 2006, Gupta founded and launched Nexus Venture Partners, a firm based in Menlo Park, California, with offices in Mumbai and Bangalore, India. As an active adviser to entrepreneurs as well as large-company CEOs worldwide, he served as chairman of the board of Red Hat Inc. and as board member for several privately held companies. He was elected a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) in 1991 and named a distinguished alumnus of IIT in 1997. In 2004, he was named as a Distinguished Alumnus by the Caltech Alumni Association. He is survived by his wife, Vinita, and daughters Anneka and Serena.