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The people behind Aavishkaar are professionals – MBAs, engineers, academics and entrepreneurs – who want to see a developed India in their lives. They have contributed money and time to unleash the creative energies of rural and semi-urban India.

AAVISHKAAR INDIA MANAGEMENT TEAM

Vineet Rai is a founder and the CEO of Aavishkaar. Mr. Rai is responsible for overall management of the fund. Prior to Aavishkaar, Mr. Rai was a founder and the CEO of GIAN, an incubator for rural innovations and ventures based in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. At GIAN, Mr. Rai was responsible for identifying, evaluating, nurturing and launching grassroots innovations based micro level enterprises for poverty alleviation. Mr. Rai has been a guest faculty at the Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow on Technology Incubation and Social Venture Funding. Mr. Rai has co-authored several papers with Professor Anil Gupta on issues concerning rural and micro innovations.

Mr. Rai holds a Post-Graduate diploma in Forestry Management from Indian Institute of Forest Management, Bhopal. Mr. Rai is based in Mumbai.

Mr. Pathiyamveetil joined Aavishkaar India in March 2002 as a Project Manager. At Aavishkaar, Mr. Pathiyamveetil evaluated and executed and is monitoring the firm’s investments into Servals and Tide Technocrats. Prior to Aavishkaar, Mr. Pathiyamveetil served for six years with Rajshree Sugars and Chemicals in Coimbatore as Deputy Manager, Finance. Mr. Pathiyamveetil has over six years of experience in financial analysis and evaluation.

Mr. Pathiyamveetil holds an MBA degree from the T. A. Pai Management Institute in Manipal.

Ajit Singh Dua

Ajit is currently a Project Manager with Aavishkaar where he is responsible for post-investment monitoring and diligence of the fund’s portfolio companies and project appraisal for prospective investments. Prior to joining Aavishkaar, Ajit has worked as a Portfolio Manager at UTI Securities Exchange Limited where he gained equity research experience in small and mid-sized companies. Ajit has also gained experience in the regulatory domain having worked with SEBI for four years.

Ajit holds an MBA (Finance) qualification from JBIMS, Mumbai and a BE (Instrumentation) degree from University of Mumbai.

Write to Ajit at ajit@aavishkaar.org

Priyank Jain

Priyank has been associated with Aavishkaar since June 2005. Currently he is a part of investment team and assists in carrying out due diligence activities for prospective investments, closing the deals and post investment monitoring of Aavishkaar’s portfolio companies.

Prior to his association with Aavishkaar, he has done projects with IMRB International, Mayur spinning and weaving mills.

Priyank holds an MBA (Finance & Marketing) qualification from Institute of Chartered Financial Analyst of India, Hyderabad and a B.Tech. in Textiles from MLVTI, University of Rajasthan.

Write to Priyank at priyank@aavishkaar.org

AAVISHKAAR INVESTMENT BOARD

Arun Diaz serves as an investment board member of Aavishkaar and is currently an entrepreneur and freelance consultant working with banks in India and abroad. Prior, Mr. Diaz headed Reuters Consulting division for South Asia. Before Reuters, Mr. Diaz completed a distinguished career with Standard Chartered Bank spanning 28 years in various positions and in various international locations.

Mr. Diaz holds a Masters in Business Management from Xavier Labour Relations Institute (XLRI), Jamshedpur, India.

Dr. V. Anantha-Nageswaran is a Managing Director with Bank Julius Baer (Singapore) Ltd. and is the head of Investment Research for Asia-Pacific and Middle East. Bank Julius Baer is a Swiss financial institution and manages both institutional money and offers private banking services to high networth individuals globally.

He has been an angel investor for many technologies in India that have sought to bridge the digital divide on a commercially viable basis such as the Simputer (www.picopeta.com) and Drishtee Development Services Limited (www.drishtee.com), a company that connects India’s villages with the world of goods and services through Internet kiosks. He serves on the Board of Drishtee.

He has been writing regularly for financial newspapers in India since 1996. Since February 2007, he has been writing every week on Tuesdays for MINT, a new financial daily published by India’s Hindustan Times and Wall Street Journal.

He got his Post-Graduate Diploma in Management from the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad in 1985 and his doctoral degree from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in 1994 for his thesis on the empirical behaviour of exchange rates.

Jennifer Meehan is a founder of Aavishkaar and a member of the investment board. She is currently the Director of Capital Markets for Grameen Foundation USA. Ms. Meehan began her career in the financial sector with now JP Morgan Chase, based both in New York and Singapore. She has since worked extensively with leading poverty-focused MFIs in Asia through the CASHPOR Network, as well as on assignments for the Microcredit Summit Campaign, Calvert Social Investment Foundation and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation.

Sushant Gupta is a member of Aavishkaar’s investment board. Mr. Gupta currently splits his time as an angel investor, a consultant for several small companies, and a promoter of an essential oils rural enterprise. Mr. Gupta commenced his entrepreneurial career in 1999 when he started Citikey, a wireless services company, the world’s first location based information service on mobile devices across Western Europe, followed by Quadrille Data Ltd, and then the European operations of Cymbal (an IT services company recently sold to Patni Computers). Prior to this, Mr. Gupta has worked in companies such as Siemens (as commissioning Engineer), Schlumberger (as Field engineer and Client account manager in India, Norway and Scotland), and Monitor (as a Strategy Consultant in London).

Sameer Wagle is a member of the investment board of Aavishkaar. Mr. Wagle is currently with Orion Capital, a Singapore based private equity firm that invests in South Asia. Mr. Wagle has 11 years of venture capital and operational experience in India and South East Asia. Mr. Wagle was earlier with Vertex Management, a global venture capital firm and before that GVFL, one of the first Indian venture firms. Mr. Wagle has also had operational stints with Crompton Greaves Ltd & DGP Windsor India, two leading Indian engineering firms.

Mr. Wagle is an Electrical Engineer from Pune University. He also holds a Masters in Business Administration from SP Jain Institute of Management and is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) from the AIMR, US.

Pravin Gandhi is a member of Aavishkaar’s investment board. Mr. Gandhi has over 28 years of experience in the IT industry in India and is an active private equity investor in the technology sector in India, currently with Infinity Ventures. In 1972, he co-founded the Hinditron group of companies (India's first IT Company), which subsequently merged with Digital Equipment Corporation in 1988.

Krithi Ramamritham is currently Head of the Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai and the Verifone Chair Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. He was a Science and Engineering Research Council (U.K.) visiting fellow at the Technical University of Vienna, Austria and at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.

Mr. Ramamritham received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah and then joined the University of Massachusetts.

Nilesh Mehta is currently the Managing Director of E-India Venture Fund. Prior to E-India, Mr. Mehta was with Meghraj Financial Services Pvt. Ltd in Mumbai. Prior to this he was with Anagram Finance Ltd in Mumbai.

Mr. Mehta holds a Masters in Business Administration from the Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He also is a Chartered Accountant from Institute of Chartered Accounts of India.

Vijay Mahajan is the architect of BASIX (www.basixindia.com), a new generation rural livelihood promotion institution. Since inception in mid 1996, BASIX has worked with over 190,000 poor households in 44 districts and eight states. Prior to BASIX, Mr. Mahajan established PRADAN (Professional Assistance for Development Action), in 1982. PRADAN's original mission was providing technical and management assistance to other NGOs, government development agencies and rural community groups. Mr. Mahajan additionally serves on the Employment Generation Mission of the Government of Andhra Pradesh. Mr. Mahajan has co-authored a book on the rural non-farm sector and written over 50 articles on rural livelihoods, development and micro-finance.

Mr. Mahajan is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (1970-75) and the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (1979-81). Mr. Mahajan studied economic development policy at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public International Affairs, Princeton University, USA in 1988-89.

Arvind Singh was with Philip Morris, New Delhi as a Product Manager. Later he worked in Citicorp Payment Products Division, New Delhi. In 1991 he became the Regional Business Development Director for Citicorp Payment Products Division in Singapore. In 1995, he became the head of Product Management in Corporate and Institutional Banking in Standard Chartered Bank.

Mr. Singh holds a Master in Business Administration from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.

Narayan Ramachandran, CFA

Narayan Ramachandran is Managing Director and Global co-head of Morgan Stanley's Emerging Markets team. The team invests about $14 billion in the the secondary markets of emerging countries including India. He is also a senior member of the firm's Global Asset Allocation Investment Committee. Mr. Ramachandran joined Morgan Stanley in 1996 and has 17 years of investment experience. Prior to joining the Firm, he was a Managing Director at RogersCasey (now CRA RogersCasey). In addition, Mr. Ramachandran was Director of Research at RogersCasey and was President of RogersCasey's Investment Advisory subsidiary. Previously, Mr. Ramachandran was a Research Associate at Goldman Sachs & Co.

Mr. Ramachandran has written articles for the academic and trade press, and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences. He holds the Chartered Financial Analyst designation.

Mr. Ramachandran received a B.S. with Distinction from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in Chemical Engineering and an M.B.A. from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Sanjeev Sanyal is Deutsche Bank's Chief Economist based in Singapore and has spent over a decade studying Asia's rapidly growing economies. Prior to joining the Deutsche Bank in 1997, he worked as an economist at Societe Generale. He is also an Adjunct Fellow of the Institue of Policy Studies, Singapore. In addition, he maintains a number other attachments including Director of the Green Accounting for Indian States Project, Visiting Scholar at Oxford University, and Chief Regional Advisor for Asia-Pacific to the John Templeton Foundation.

Sanjeev read economics at Shri Ram College of Commerce, Delhi and St. John's College, Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar (1992-1995). He was awarded the Eisenhower Fellowship for 2007 in recognition of his work on the economics of "Global Cities" and large financial hubs.