Ujala Cygnus

Avinash Kenkare is a private equity professional with 40 + years of successful private equity investing experience. Avinash co-founded Somerset Indus Capital Partners and focuses on fund raising, fund management, identifying and evaluating investment opportunities, monitoring and value addition efforts at Somerset.

Prior to founding Somerset Indus Capital Partners LLC, Avinash was a Managing Partner of Somerset Healthcare Advisors, LLC, and worked for Health Evolution Partners, a $500 million US based healthcare focused private equity fund, co-leading their efforts in investing in life sciences companies primarily in the US.  He joined DLJ Investment Banking in 1998 and DLJ Merchant Banking in 1999. Since joining the Merchant Banking group, he concentrated on DLJMB’s healthcare initiatives, working on most of DLJMBP III’s healthcare transactions, including Warner Chilcott, Accellent, Nycomed, Kinetic Concepts, and Thiemann. He also worked for The Carlyle Group in New York focused on Carlyle’s healthcare investments. He served as a Director of Nycomed Pharma, BioPartners, Next Pharma Technologies, Accellent Corporation and Focus Diagnostics. And, prior to DLJ, he ran CASI, Inc., an engineering consulting company.

He graduated from Howard University magna cum laude in 1982 and Lehigh University in 1984 and received an MBA with Distinction from Wharton in 1998

Mayur has over 35 years of experience across the Healthcare, Pharmaceutical, and FMCG sectors, with roles spanning Private Equity, Strategy, Advisory Services, Operations, Manufacturing, and Marketing. Mayur co-founded Somerset Indus Capital Partners and focuses on fund raising, new investments, building deal pipelines as well as working on value addition initiatives at an operating and strategic level for portfolio companies.

Prior to founding Somerset, Mayur was an Executive Director at Lexicon Healthcare, a Strategic Advisory Firm involved in cross border healthcare transactions with Israel, Australia and Japan. In this period, he established a Medical device company based on Israeli MedTech in the areas of sleep apnoea and cardiac diagnostics as well as a dental stem cell banking & research start-up.  Earlier, at IMS Health, a global healthcare consulting company, he set up their India practice, wherein he advised major MNC and Indian Companies on their Growth Strategies and Market Entry strategies in India. Prior to this, he served as a Director of Kare Group – his family run contract manufacturing group wherein he developed strong operations experience across Manufacturing and Marketing. Earlier, at German Remedies, he headed the business development function wherein he led OTC and M&A initiatives and at Colgate Palmolive, he was a member of the strategy and special projects group wherein he was involved in company M&A activities as well as new manufacturing projects.

He has also been involved in the Healthcare start up space wherein he has mentored several healthcare entrepreneurs. He is on the Advisory Board of SINE (IIT Bombay business incubator) as a mentor and is a key member of the Healthcare Special Interest Group (SIG) of the IIT Bombay Alumni Association. He is also on the Evaluation committee of the govt. biotech incubator BIRAC for their BIG grant proposals and also serves on the Board of Directors of the IIT Bombay Alumni Association.

Mayur graduated from IIT Bombay in Chemical Engineering in 1987 and then did a Masters in Chemical Engineering from Penn State University and an MBA in Finance from University of Texas at Austin.

Ramesh Kannan has over 40 years of healthcare consulting and has experience across management, business, finance with expertise in business strategy, innovation, and organizational transformation. At Somerset, he focuses on fund raising, managing investor relations, deal sourcing, evaluation, concluding the deal, monitoring and value addition efforts.

His previous work includes advising companies on resource raising across debt, structured debt, equity, and private equity. He has supported organizations in strategic initiatives such as local consolidation, regional aggregation, pan-India expansion, and global integration, while facilitating strategic partnerships, alliances, joint ventures, mergers and acquisitions, and leveraged buyouts. He has worked with several healthcare delivery groups in South India to raise private equity funding and is well versed with the deal structuring, documentation, and monitoring processes followed by the PE community.

He has also advised a wide range of healthcare organizations including RV Hospitals, Vasantha Subramanian Hospitals (VS Hospitals), VS Biotech, Muthu Medicals, Gunasheela IVF, NU Hospitals, NU Trust, Kosmoderma Clinics, , Sparsh Nephrocare, Jananam Fertility, Qikwell, Impulse Technologies, Dhiti Omics, Sahyadri Hospitals, Vikram Hospitals, HCG ( BIO & Curie ), Indus Health Plus, Image Hospitals Jhankaria Imaging (now SRL), Mallya Hospital, GVN Hospitals, Express Clinics, White Cross Clinics, White Lotus Clinics, ISIS Medicare, Pinnacle, CK Group, Ayurvaid, Fungroo, Evolko, Arvee Synthesis, Vanguard Therapeutics, Genotypic, QTLomics, Motherhood and Cloud 9, among others.

He is a Fellow Member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India.