Vistas Acquisition Company II Inc.
MANAGEMENT & BOARD
Executive Officers
F. Jacob Cherian, 41
Chief Executive Officer, Director
Mr. Cherian has served as a Co-Chief Executive Officer and as a director of Anghami since February 2022. Previously, Mr. Cherian served as VMAC’s Chief Executive Officer, Secretary and a member of its board of directors from April 2020 until VMAC’s business combination with Anghami. Mr. Cherian co-founded and served as Chief Executive Officer and a director of I-AM Capital Acquisition Company Inc. (“I-AM”), a special purpose acquisition company, from August 2017 to February 2019. I-AM completed a $50 million initial public offering in August 2017 and completed a business combination in December 2018, listing the first e-sports company on Nasdaq (Simplicity Esports & Gaming). Mr. Cherian also served as Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and director of Millennium India Acquisition Company Inc., a special purpose acquisition company, from March 2006 to October 2013, completing a $58 million initial public offering in July 2006. Millennium India completed a business combination with SMC, an India-headquartered leading diversified financial services company. Mr. Cherian served as a director of SMC from business combination to December 2015. Mr. Cherian’s prior work and experience with JP Morgan & Co., as a director at KPMG LLP and as Partner at Computer Sciences Corp., spans 15 years and three continents of Europe, Middle East and South Asia. Mr. Cherian holds a B.A. in Accounting & Information Systems from Queens College of CUNY and an MBA in International Finance from St. John’s University. He has also served as Adjunct Professor of Finance at the Tobin College of Business at St. John’s University’s MBA Program for ten years. Mr. Cherian has served as a member of the board of directors on a number of public and private and not-for profit boards.
Saurabh Gupta, CAIA, 44
Chief Financial Officer, Co-Founder and Director
Mr. Gupta was a co-founder and previously served as a member of the board of directors of VMAC from May 2020 until VMAC’s business combination with Anghami. Mr. Gupta is the founder and managing director of M! Capital Ventures Pte. Ltd., a Singapore-based specialty media investment firm and managing partner and director of The Asian Film Fund — Series 1, which is registered in Mauritius as a Global Business Category 1 licensed entity. Over the last seven years, his media ventures have invested in films across productions and distributions, across several leading OTT/digital platforms. In his personal capacity, Mr. Gupta has co-produced several additional films in India and Hollywood. He is a highly experienced banking, asset management and media investments professional with over 22 years of work experience, the majority of which has been spent in leading senior functions within the banking industry, including executive director at Bank Julius Baer, senior director at ANZ Bank, vice president at ABN AMRO Bank and relationship manager at Citibank, and as a senior consultant at Arete Financial Partners, a management consultancy and investment advisory company. Mr. Gupta also serves as a director of CitiState Capital Pte. Ltd, which is the parent investment holding company for his media ventures, SHS Advisors Pte. Ltd., which is a business advisory and consulting firm based in Singapore, and WE Capital Partners Pte. Ltd., which is a wealth management and advisory firm. Mr. Gupta also serves an advisor to Vistas Media Capital Pte. Ltd., a media investment holding company headquartered in Singapore.
Abhayanand Singh, 57
Chief Financial Officer
Mr. Singh previously served as VMAC’s co-founder and director since March 2021 until VMAC’s business combination with Anghami. Mr. Singh also has served as the CEO and as a director of Vistas Media Capital Pte Ltd. and its affiliates, a media and entertainment company, since May 2018. Previously, he served as the co-founder and chief executive officer of Indie Muviz Pte. Ltd (“Muviz”), a digital streaming and content production company. He also has experience in the banking, private equity and asset management industries, as a managing director of Pinnacle Fund Management Ltd, an investment management company, from 2010 to 2013, and as an assistant vice president at HSBC from 2005 to 2010. Over the last six years, Mr. Singh’s companies have invested in more than 15 films and series across productions and distributions, which have been released worldwide, including in India and the United States and across several leading OTT/Digital platforms globally. Mr. Singh also serves as a director of Sidus Consulting Pte. Ltd., a management consulting company, and Muviz. Mr. Singh holds an MBA in marketing from Chetana’s Institute of Marketing & Research Mumbai and a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Lucknow, India.
Dhruv Saxena, 30
Chief Strategy Officer
Mr. Saxena is a seasoned management consultant with over seven years of experience in media, technology and private equity across Asia, Europe and the United States and specializing in value creation and performance improvement. Mr. Saxena previously served as an associate to VMAC. Mr. Saxena was a consultant at Bain & Company (“Bain”) from January 2014 to May 2019 and from October 2019 to December 2019. He also maintained Bain’s United States Media Point of View IP, was a founding member of the TMT Centre in China, and worked extensively on OTT strategies for telecommunications and cable companies. As part of Bain’s private equity practice, he drove due diligence across media and technology for clients. Mr. Saxena is currently an MBA candidate at INSEAD focusing on finance and decision sciences.
Board of Directors
Dr. Klaas Baks, Ph.D., 49
Director Nominee
Dr. Baks has served as a director of Anghami since February 2022. Dr. Baks has also served as a director of International Media Acquisition Company, a special purpose acquisition company, since September 2021. Dr. Baks previously served as a director of VMAC from August 2020 until VMAC’s business combination with Anghami. Dr. Baks is the Co-Founder and Director of the Emory Center for Alternative Investments and has been a finance professor at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School since September 2002. He teaches courses in private equity, venture capital and distressed investing and has been recognized with nine awards, including Emory University’s highest award for teaching excellence, the Emory Williams Distinguished Teaching Award, the Marc F. Adler Prize for Teaching Excellence awarded by alumni and the Donald R. Keough Award for Excellence. Since October 2014, Dr. Baks has served as the Atlanta Chair for Tiger 21, a peer-to-peer learning network for high-net-worth investors whose members manage more than $50 billion and are entrepreneurs, inventors and top executives focused on improving investment acumen and exploring common issues of wealth preservation, estate planning and family dynamics. Dr. Baks also serves as a director or advisor for various companies and investment funds, including American Virtual Cloud Technologies (NASDAQ: AVCT) (since July 2017) — acquired through a SPAC business combination, Buckhead One Financial (since January 2018), JOYN (from May 2017 to March 2020), Peachtree Hotel Group (since August 2016), Backend Benchmarking (since April 2018) and TWO Capital Partners (since September 2009). Dr. Baks also has served on the Investment Committee of the Westminster Schools Board of Trustees since September 2017. Prior to joining Emory University, he held positions at Fuji Bank in Tokyo, Japan, Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong and the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. Dr. Baks’s research and teaching focuses on issues in alternative investments, entrepreneurial finance and investment management, and he has published papers in numerous academic and business journals, including the Wall Street Journal.
Abhinav Somani, 33
Director Nominee
Since September 2021, Mr. Somani has served as the Chief Operating Officer of Clearview AI. Mr. Somani previously served as a member of the board of directors of VMAC from August 2020 until VMAC’s business combination with Anghami. From July 2019 to September 2021, Mr. Somani was the Managing Director of artificial intelligence software products at MRI Software, LLC, a global company that provides real estate and investment management software to real estate owners, investors, and operators. Mr. Somani was the Chief Executive Officer of Leverton Corporation, an artificial intelligence SaaS company that was sold to MRI Software, LLC, from February 2017 to July 2019. From August 2014 to February 2017, he was the Senior Vice President of business development at smartShift Technologies, LLC, an enterprise software and services company specializing in upgrades to high-performance, next-generation computing environments, including moves from on-premise to cloud, relational data to big data and platform-to-platform. Prior to that, Mr. Somani was an associate at ICV Partners and American Securities from August 2012 to July 2014 where he worked with portfolio companies to improve their sales, enhance marketing, turn around ailing business segments, and increase operational efficiencies. He was also an investment banking analyst at Rothschild & Co. from July 2009 to July 2012 where he worked in equity capital markets and mergers and acquisitions.
David Knower, 61
Director Nominee
Mr. Knower has served as Chief Operating Officer and Managing Director of Cerberus Deutschland Beteiligungsberatung GmbH since 2003. Mr. Knower previously was the owner and managing director of Invenimus, an international consulting firm headquartered near Frankfurt, Germany. Mr. Knower spent 11 years, from 1986 to 1997, in various finance and controlling positions for Procter & Gamble in Germany, the rest of Europe and Asia-Pacific. Mr. Knower currently serves as the Vice President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Germany, a director of the Aspen Institute in Germany and a director of the American Institute of Contemporary German Studies in Washington. In 1983, Mr. Knower received two undergraduate degrees from the University of Massachusetts, (Economics, German) with honors, and was named a Commonwealth Scholar. In 1985, Mr. Knower earned an MBA in Management, with honors, from the American Graduate School of International Management (Thunderbird).
Sergei Bespalov, 50
Director Nominee
He has 29 years of experience in business and legal consulting through numerous board and advisory board positions for multinational businesses across various industries, including real estate, entertainment, gaming, trading, natural resources, medical, sports and legal. Mr. Bespalov is the Founder and Co-Chairman of Aldamisa Entertainment, LLC, a film production company that has produced and released more than twenty films with total budgets close to $500 million since March 2011. Almost all of its movies have received numerous international nominations and awards, including an Oscar nomination. He is also a seasoned entrepreneur focusing on investments in the media, gaming and real estate sectors. His experience in the legal field include roles as Of Counsel at Law Offices of Marks & Sokolov LLC since September 2016 and Managing Partner at Law Offices of Sergei Bespalov & Associates since September 1997. Mr. Bespalov earned a B.S. in electrical engineering from Temple University and a J.D. from Widener University School of Law.