Board Of Directors

Bijaei Jayaraj

Bijaei has a strong leadership and management background, with unbridled passion and innovative ideas for Consumer Loyalty & Relationship management businesses. Bijaei earned his business management education as a part of the Founding Class of the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad.

  

Bijaei earned his Bachelor's Degree from Loyola College and Master's Degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Subsequently, Bijaei worked in the advertising industry in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman and with McCann Erickson Worldwide (FP7) in Dubai, UAE before returning to India to pursue his business management studies at the ISB.

  

After ISB, Bijaei joined Jet Airways, India’s largest airline and worked as the Head of its Loyalty Program - Jet Privilege (JP). While at Jet, Bijaei led the conversion of JP from a domestic loyalty program into a global loyalty program, and recalibrated the fundamental structure of the Program. He also created a host of global partnerships for JP with companies such as Shangri La, Lufthansa, HSBC, Qantas, Raffles, and Hertz, and made JP a decisively revenue-generating and profitable department for the airline. The program won the Freddie award, based on consumer votes for the first time under Bijaei’s leadership.

  

Post Jet Airways, and before joining Loylty Rewardz, Bijaei worked with MasterCard Worldwide as Associate Vice President & Account Head, responsible for MasterCard’s relationship with State Bank of India, India’s largest bank with over 33 million Debit Cards. While at MasterCard, Bijaei was twice conferred with the MasterCard SAMEA Star Award (South Asia, ME & Africa) & once with the APMEA Star Award (Asia Pacific, ME & Africa) for his achievements for MasterCard businesses worldwide.

Raghuveer Mendu

Raghu is a co-founder of Ventureast. He is part of the founding group that was responsible for the first privatization of a venture fund (APIDC-Venture Capital Limited) in India, in the mid 1990s. He is a General Partner with the fund having played a role in helping set up the organziation and its funds. He invests in the broad technology and services space spanning, IT, Mobile, Education, Hospitality, Alternative Energy and Water.

 

Raghu is one of those people who has moved from the good side to the dark side...proving the old adage that those who can, do, and those who can't, become VCs!!!

 

Prior to starting Ventureast, Raghu has had extensive corporate and entrepreneurial experience and as angel in the US. As an entrepreneur, he has built and sold three companies (including one of the early technology product companies in India) in the technology products and services space. As a part of US publicly listed roll up, he has also acquired over 8 companies.

 

Before his entrepreneurial stint, Raghu spent several years in the computer and banking industry. He started a new subsidiary Union Bancsystems for Union Bank in Los Angeles in the mid 1980s and helped it to grow over $10Million in two years from a Greenfield start. Prior to this he was with Nixdorf Computer, with responsibility for product development (hardware and software) in the US and then was given the responsibility for establishing the overall strategy and sales infrastructure for the Financial Industries Group, which helped establish Nixdorf's beachhead in the US.

 

Raghu and his wife, Rashida, are co-founders of The Heart of a Child Foundation, a U.S. charitable organization focused on supporting research in the area of Congenital Heart Defects and Children born with Heart Defects. Raghu is an avid foodie (both the cooking and the consuming of it!), a consummate sports nut and enjoys traveling and spending time outdoors.

 

Raghu holds a Bachelor of Technology degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India and obtained his MBA from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Rahul Khanna

Rahul Khanna is Managing Director at Canaan Partners, India. He has over fifteen years of investing and operating experience in ICT across India and the U.S. Having returned from Silicon Valley in 2005, Rahul has played a key role in the development of the venture ecosystem in India and is well recognized as an active investor in several high growth companies. At Canaan Partners, Rahul serves on the Board of Naaptol.com.

 

Prior to joining Canaan India in early 2011, Rahul was the founding director of Clearstone Venture Advisors, a firm that manages investments in India for Clearstone Venture Partners. At Clearstone, Rahul was responsible for building the platform that would focus on early stage investments in verticals like financial services, telecom, media and education. While at Clearstone, he served on the Boards of Billdesk and Games2Win.

 

Rahul earned an MBA in 2000 from the Kellogg Graduate School at Northwestern University. He also serves on the Investment Committee of SONG, a social impact fund sponsored by the Soros Economic Development Fund, Pierre Omidyar and Google.