Former Infosys CFO Ranganath Mavinakere to head Murthy’s family office

Former Infosys CFO and company veteran, Ranganath D Mavinakere, has joined NR Narayanamurthy’s family office Catamaran to lead its investments, sources said.

“Ranga is NRN’s longtime trusted lieutenant, and someone considered close to the family. He’s the best person to manage the family office,” said a person familiar with Mavinakere and the Murthy family.

Launched in 2009 with an initial corpus of $120 million from the Murthy family, Catamaran Ventures has investments in companies such as Hector Beverages (the maker of Paper Boat drinks), online insurer Acko and healthcare provider Wellspring. Catamaran also owns 76 percent in Cloudtail India, a joint venture with Amazon.com. Cloudtail is one of the biggest sellers on Amazon India platform.

Mavinakere spent 18 years at Infosys, including three as its CFO. He was a part of the ‘dream team’ that was formed to revive Infosys when Murthy returned to the company in 2013 along with his son Rohan. Along with the Murthy duo, senior executives Mavinakere, HR Binod and Deepak Padaki were the key men running Infosys between June 2013 and June 2014. Mavinakere left Infosys in November 2018.

When Mavinakere resigned from Infosys, Murthy had described him as ‘one of the best CFOs’ in India and a ‘rare individual’.

“He is everything the idea of Infosys has always stood for. His departure is an irreplaceable loss for Infosys at this critical juncture," Murthy had said in a statement.

Murthy and Mavinakere had not responded to emails sent on December 8. We will update the story if we hear from them.

Another person added that Mavinakere, who is also an independent board member of HDFC Bank, will lead an overhaul of Catamaran Ventures including “a rethink of the family office’s startup investments.”