I am delighted to share the news that we have welcomed Anand Chandrasekaran to Celesta Capital as a Managing Partner.
We are fortunate to expand the Celesta team with such an accomplished investor, entrepreneur, and operating executive. Anand has spent time as a visionary product leader at companies including Meta, Bharti Airtel, Snapdeal, Five9, and others. He served as a partner at General Catalyst and has been recognized as India’s top seed investor the past three years in a row. Most recently, he co-founded Celesta portfolio company Crescendo, helping to incubate and grow the company to over $50M in revenue and a $500M valuation in less than a year.
Beyond his experience alone, Anand’s ethos and rare combination of skill sets make him such a phenomenal fit with Celesta.
Celesta is singularly focused on opportunities to drive emerging, value-creating technologies to mass adoption. Anand has mirrored this focus throughout his career, consistently working to expand access to new technologies as a product builder, VC investor, and entrepreneur.
Celesta is a team of passionate company builders. Anand shares this enthusiasm, leveraging his decades of operating experience and deep knowledge of technology shifts to help form and scale seminal technology companies. He understands that early-stage investing is a unique window for craftsmanship and helping to positively influence a company’s trajectory from the start.
Celesta is a huge believer in the growth potential of the U.S. - India corridor. Few VC investors possess the depth of knowledge and experience Anand has developed in this arena. He is keenly aware of the macroeconomic realignment underway – as the world moves away from reliance upon China and seeks more supply chain diversity – which is driving India and the U.S. to build a closer partnership for development of strategic technologies. He has been on the front lines of India’s rapid technology shifts over the past few decades, sharing our belief in the country’s readiness to develop into a rising global hub for deep tech companies in defense, AI, semiconductors, and other sectors. And he understands how products are built in India, but also how to turn those products into enduring global businesses by partnering with Silicon Valley and the U.S. networks.
It’s clear we share the same DNA, and that Anand will further strengthen our muscle as deep tech investors and company builders.
Further, Anand will complement Celesta’s strong track record in the hardware and semiconductor space with the breadth and depth of his experience in transformational consumer and enterprise software applications, in particular giving us an even stronger range of expertise within the AI tech stack. Crescendo’s story perfectly encapsulates this opportunity as a company driving industry transformation through practical manifestation of Generative AI adoption in the enterprise. He will continue his responsibilities at Crescendo as he transitions to Celesta.
On behalf of my other founding partners Nic Brathwaite and Michael Marks, as well as the rest of our firm, please join us in welcoming Anand.