Karthik Prabhakar is Executive Director and Global head of Fundraising, at Chiratae Ventures India Advisors (formerly IDG Ventures India Advisors). Karthik is also responsible for leading investments in Consumer media & tech and Fin-tech sectors. Karthik also leads marketing for the firm.

He has been part of the Indian tech ecosystem since 2005 with experience spanning engineering, rapid prototyping, marketing, fundraising, investment advisory and portfolio management.

For three consecutive years in 2016, 2017 and 2018, Karthik was recognized as one among the global top 100 Rising Stars in the venture industry by Global Corporate Venturing, held in California, US. Karthik was also recognized as among the Top 40 under 40 professionals in the Alternative Assets industry in India organized by AIWMI in Jan 2018.

Prior to Chiratae Ventures, Karthik worked with Intel in their Ideas to Reality team, a technology incubator focused on building IoT products around the Intel Atom processor. As a tech marketing person, he played a key role in rapid prototyping, conceptualizing field trial plans and creating Go-To-Market strategies for new products ideas around retail, digital advertising and video surveillance. Karthik was also actively involved in recruiting and mentoring new members for the group. Prior to that, he worked in the embedded systems team building security software for network processors. Karthik, in spare part time, worked on developing innovative IoT/embedded solutions and has co-authored a patent in the area of Wireless Networks.

Karthik holds a Bachelor’s degree in Information Science from RV College of Engineering and an MBA (PGDM) from IIM Chennai.