Chetan Puttagunta (born May 14, 1986) is an American venture capital investor and General Partner at Benchmark, a venture capital firm.
He was named to Forbes Magazine's 30 under 30 in venture capital in 2015 and has been featured on The Forbes Midas List, a ranking of the world's top venture capital investors, for the last six consecutive years.
Puttagunta was born in Hyderabad, India, to chemist parents who emigrated to the United States. He attended Quince Orchard High School in Maryland. Puttagunta received his bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2007.
Following graduation, Puttagunta worked as an investment banker in technology M&A at Houlihan Lokey and with H.I.G. Capital's San Francisco office.
In 2011, he joined New Enterprise Associates (NEA), a venture capital firm investing in technology and healthcare companies. His notable investments at NEA include MuleSoft, MongoDB and Elastic, all of which he served on board of. In 2017, MongoDB and MuleSoft completed their initial public offerings, and in 2018, Salesforce acquired MuleSoft for approximately $6.8 billion. At the time of the acquisition, (NEA) was the companyâÂÂs largest shareholder. In July 2018, he joined Benchmark as a General Partner at age 32.
Puttagunta currently serves on the boards of Elastic, where he is chairman, Modern Treasury, Legora, Airbyte, LangChain, Starcloud, fomo, Duffel, and others. He previously served on the boards of Manus (acquired by Meta), Acquia (acquired by Vista Equity) and Scout (acquired by Workday).
Puttagunta lives in San Francisco, CA.