Most venture capitalists arrive from banking, consulting, or a short stint at a startup that ended well. Devdutt Yellurkar arrived differently. He had already built two companies, sold one, and spent nearly a decade at Infosys when it was still an experiment - before he wrote his first term sheet. The biography reads less like a career and more like a relay race where every leg prepared him for the next one, and the baton never dropped.
The starting point was a forest in India. His father was a forest officer, which meant the Yellurkar household moved through India's jungles with a certain frequency. He played cricket constantly - in the fields, on makeshift pitches, in leagues. He studied statistics at Fergusson College in Pune, a choice that looks obvious in retrospect but was unusual at the time. Numbers, patterns, probabilities. The kind of training that makes you a better investor than any MBA case study ever could.
Then came Infosys. He was among the company's earliest employees, joining when the firm's revenue was still under a million dollars. As Senior VP of Sales and Marketing, he helped define and sell the offshore software services model - a concept so novel in the late 1980s that he essentially had to explain what software was before he could explain what offshore delivery meant. Infosys went public in 1992. By the time he left in 1995, it had become one of India's most iconic companies. He had helped build the template that an entire generation of Indian IT firms would follow.
The Yantra chapter is the one that venture capitalists pay attention to most. In 1995, Yellurkar co-founded Yantra Corporation as a spin-off from Infosys - one of the first true software product companies to emerge from India. The company built e-commerce and supply chain software for the world's largest multi-channel retailers. It grew to 700 employees across the US and India. And it was acquired by Sterling Commerce, an AT&T subsidiary, which was later acquired by IBM. The Yantra platform became IBM's supply chain software. That is not a minor footnote.
By 2006, he had served as Chief Strategy Officer at Sterling Commerce following the acquisition and then, unusually, chose to step back. He returned to India for roughly two years - a deliberate sabbatical, time with family, a reset. He did some work as a venture partner at Rho Ventures during this period, getting his first taste of institutional investing. The diagnosis was immediate: he was good at it, and he wanted more.
CRV came in 2008. Charles River Ventures had been investing since 1970 - one of the oldest continuously operating VC firms in America. Yellurkar joined as General Partner. His first notable deal was a Series A in a Danish customer-support software company called Zendesk: $1.5 million for roughly 30% of the company. No one else had written an institutional check. He had talked to customers. He believed the product worked. The company went public in 2014 and was acquired by Hellman & Friedman for approximately $10 billion in 2022. The math is not subtle.
Over the next fifteen years at CRV, the portfolio grew to include companies that now sit at the center of how software gets built and bought: Airtable (backed in the 2015 Series A, now valued above $11 billion), Postman (he led the Series B, used by tens of millions of developers), Kong (API infrastructure), Aviatrix (cloud networking), SignalFx (acquired by Splunk), Cybereason (cybersecurity), Gupshup (conversational AI). The through-line is not sector - it is stage. He invests early, when the spreadsheet is still a guess and the product is still a conviction.
His edge is legible if you trace the biography. He did not learn enterprise software by watching from the bleachers. He sold it. He built it. He ran the sales org and the product roadmap and the board calls. When a founder sits across from him and explains a go-to-market problem, he is not analyzing an abstraction. He is recognizing a pattern he has lived three times over. That is what "operator-turned-VC" actually means when it is real rather than decorative.
In 2022 - the same year Zendesk's acquisition closed and CRV announced $1.5 billion in new funds - he co-founded Propeller VC alongside Brian Halligan, the co-founder of HubSpot. The fund raised $100 million and pointed its capital at ocean-climate technology: carbon dioxide removal from seawater, marine biotech and algae, and ocean industrials including shipping decarbonization, wave energy, and desalination. The partnership with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution gave the fund scientific credibility and proprietary access to IP. The thesis was simple and startling: in 2021, ocean technology represented less than one percent of all climate-tech venture investment. That gap was the opportunity.
The forest officer's son had come full circle. He grew up surrounded by wild things his father was paid to protect. Fifty years later, he is writing checks to protect the ocean. It is not a metaphor. It is a biography that finally makes sense as a whole.