Managing Director & Senior Partner
London
Ajay Chowdhury leads BCG Digital Ventures (DV) for Western Europe and South America (WESA). Digital Ventures is Boston Consulting Group’s innovation, product development, venture, and commercialization firm. DV goes beyond providing strategic advice about digital opportunities to forming strategic partnerships to help clients rapidly launch and grow transformational digital products, platforms, and businesses.
Ajay serves on the BCGDV executive committee, and leads the Principal Investors & Private Equity (PIPE) practice for DV in WESA. He has over 25 years of startup and venture experience helping clients build disruptive new digital businesses in a wide range of industries, especially consumer, retail, technology, media, and telecommunications. Ajay has particular expertise in mobile, e-commerce, digital media, data analytics, digital retail, and government; and strong functional expertise in sales, strategy development, product development, and fundraising.
Before joining the firm in 2015, Ajay was CEO of Seatwave, a leading European online and mobile ticket marketplace that he sold to Ticketmaster. He was also Chairman and founder investor in Shazam, which was sold to Apple. He was also founder and CEO of ComQi, a global cloud-based retail technology platform to allow retailers to connect on and offline businesses. In addition, he founded a venture capital fund and worked at Bain & Company. He serves on the boards of several other companies including as Chairman of Cambridge Enterprise, Cambridge University’s spinout arm.
Ajay’s children's novel was published by Penguin in 2016 and his detective novel, The Waiter, will be published in May 2021.
Shell and BCG Digital Ventures have paired numerous times to reimagine the future and, in the process, have incubated and launched several new businesses. MachineMax, which evolved from an initiative whose initial aim was to find new applications for Shell lubricants, provides an answer to a critical challenge facing the mining and construction industries: how to maximize the productivity of their equipment.