Ambareesh Murty

Ambareesh Vedantam Murty (born 1971/1972) was an Indian entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and CEO of Pepperfry, India's largest online furniture and home-goods marketplace. He held a B.E. from Delhi College of Engineering and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (IIM Calcutta). His entrepreneurial streak appeared early — while still a student in the early 1990s he ran a home-tutoring venture, Tutors' Bureau.

His corporate career began in 1996 as a management trainee at Cadbury India, where he rose to brand manager across the company's Delhi, Rajasthan and Mumbai operations. Over the following decade he built a marketing-heavy résumé that spanned VP of Marketing at ICICI Prudential AMC, brand leadership at Levi Strauss India, and a marketing role at Britannia, alongside a short-lived financial-training venture (Origin Resource, 2003). In March 2008 he became Country Manager for eBay covering India (and, per his speaker bios, the Philippines and Malaysia), and served as Vice Chairman of the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI).

In January 2012 Murty co-founded Pepperfry with Ashish Shah, pioneering a managed-marketplace model for furniture and home products in India, complete with an asset-light logistics network and physical "Studio" experience centres. Under his leadership Pepperfry raised roughly $250–$307 million across eight rounds from backers including Goldman Sachs and Bertelsmann India Investments, reaching a reported ~$500M valuation by 2020. He was widely respected in the Indian startup community for a thoughtful, people-first leadership style.

Murty died suddenly of a cardiac arrest on 7 August 2023, at age 51, in his hotel room in Leh while on an offsite trip with Pepperfry's strategy team. His death prompted an outpouring of tributes across the Indian startup ecosystem.

• Invested as an individual angel, typically alongside large syndicates of co-investors, rather than through a structured fund.
• Concentrated on early-stage (seed/angel) consumer and retail startups — categories adjacent to his own e-commerce and brand-marketing expertise.
• Favored founder-led D2C and consumer-internet plays in apparel, kids' products and storage/logistics.
• As an operator-turned-investor, he brought hands-on e-commerce, marketplace and brand-building experience rather than purely financial capital.