Industry luminary and Silicon Valley veteran, Dr. Naren Gupta, joins mChek Board of Directors

Bangalore, December 9, 2009: mChek, India’s leading Mobile Banking and Payments Service Provider, today announced that Silicon Valley veteran, Dr. Naren Gupta, Managing Partner of Nexus Venture Partners has joined the board of directors of the company. The company also announced that Nexus Venture Partners had led the Series-B financing of the company earlier in the year.

Dr. Gupta co-founded Integrated Systems Inc. (ISI) in 1980 to develop products for embedded software development which went public in 1990. Dr. Gupta served as ISI’s President and CEO from founding until 1994 and as Chairman until 2000. Integrated Systems merged with Wind River Systems in 2000 and Dr. Gupta then served as Wind River’s Vice Chairman since then until its acquisition by Intel in 2009. Dr. Gupta also serves on the boards of Red Hat and Tibco Software and several privately-held companies. Naren has over 20 years of early and early-growth stage investment experience in US and India. Several of his earlier investments have had successful public exits, including Digital Link (IPO), E-Tek Dynamics (IPO), RightNow (IPO), Numerical Technologies (IPO, acquired by Synopsis) and Speedera Networks (acquired by Akamai). He also serves as a board member for two non-profit organizations – the Community Foundation of Silicon Valley and the American India Foundation.

Riding on the explosive growth in the mobile industry, mobile banking and payments are seen as one of the key growth areas – with banking and financial services institutions aiming to leverage the ubiquitous deployment of the mobile phone to drive adoption, lower costs to serve and increase customer loyalty and convenience.

“The opportunity that mChek is looking to serve comes once in a generation and I’m excited to work side-by-side with the mChek-team and its business partners to help build a lasting company – one that earns the trust of banks, telecom operators, merchants, consumers and regulators around the world”, said Dr. Gupta.

mChek is a pioneer in this segment working closely with leading Telecom operators in India and Sri Lanka – Airtel, Tata and Dialog Telekom, the world’s leading Card association, Visa, as well as leading banks in India and Sri Lanka – State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Corporation Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, Citibank and NDB Bank. mChek’s services support mobile banking, mobile payments and financial inclusion.

“Naren brings more than 30 years of first hand entrepreneurial experience in the Mecca of startups, Silicon Valley, and has served on the board of directors of more than 50 companies of all stages”, said Mr. Sanjay Swamy, CEO of mChek. “His guidance on the mChek Board will provide the maturity and long-term thinking in the company – which is essential for us, as we strive to earn the trust of our business partners and consumers, as well as helping augment the leadership in management team”, added Mr. Sanjay Swamy.