Awards 2024

Ambalika Banerji

Dr Amit Kakar

Navneet Munot

Rishabh Mariwala

Ashwini Asokan

Gopal Srinivasan

Gopal Srinivasan is the Chairman and Managing Director of TVS Capital Funds P Ltd.

A scion of the TVS family from the third generation, his entrepreneurial career spans well over three decades in which he has founded, steered and scaled up over 10 new ventures across diverse business verticals.

Passionate about fostering startups and mentoring young entrepreneurs and is an avid angel investor. He is a founding member of The Chennai Angels, one of the premier angels investing networks in India.

Gopal takes a keen interest in public policy matters of the VC/PE Industry, being actively involved with the regulators for the financial markets by dint of his engagements with SEBI (Member of AIPAC), the Indian Venture Capital Association (IVCA) & Confederation of Indian Industry (CII); He was also the Member of the Venture Capital Investment Committee for SIDBI’s Fund of Funds for Start-ups (FFS) programme in ’18-’19. Gopal is a Governing Council member of Reserve Bank Innovation Hub (RBIH), which has been formed in Dec’20; RBIH is a centre for idea generation and development to provide the facilitating environment, encourage collaboration, and in the process promote innovation in the financial sector. Gopal is also a non-official member on the National Start-up Advisory Council (NSAC) being formed by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPITT) in Jan’21 to advise the Government of India on measures needed to build a strong eco-system for nurturing innovation and startups in the country to drive sustainable economic growth and generate large scale employment opportunities.

He is also actively involved in knowledge initiatives through his involvement in academic institution. He is a member of University of Michigan’s India Advisory Board.

Gopal is also the Chairman of Chennai International Centre, a think-tank that brings together a cornucopia of thought leaders from the spheres of business, the economy, policymaking, science, art, culture and entrepreneurship.

Gopal has been recently appointed as the Honorary Consul General for the Kingdom of Netherlands in Tamil Nadu.

Neha Grover

Neha Grover is currently Regional Lead of IFC’s South Asia Funds group where she is responsible for identifying and investing into PE Funds, managing the current PE portfolio and focusing on co-investments. She serves on Advisory Boards of 6 (six) PE Funds.

Her professional and personal investing experience spans across private and public markets and across diverse industries with specific focus on Consumer, Healthcare, Financial services, Manufacturing and Education sectors.

Prior to IFC, she has worked across 2 complete fund cycles at Baring India for over 12 years. She was Principal and India CFO at Baring Private Equity Partners India – a leading emerging markets private equity group with over USD 14 billion under management.

Neha features as one of the top 100 women in finance in India (AIWMI 2019 list). She is an all-India rank-holding Chartered Accountant, a Company Secretary, and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Lucknow (Ranked top 5).

Padmaja Ruparel

Padmaja Ruparel is the Founding Partner of the IAN Fund, a uniquely differentiated Rs. 450 crores (~$70mn) Fund which along with IAN, is set to create the largest horizontal platform in India for investing in seed and early stage ventures. She is also the Co-Founder & President of IAN, India's first & one of the world’s largest group of business angels, comprising the who's who of successful entrepreneurs and dynamic CEOs from India and overseas.

Padmaja is a Co-Chair of Global Business Angel Network. She also operationalised TiE Delhi, which has been ranked as the number one chapter globally for the last 4 consecutive years. She played a key role as Executive Director in building the Indian Venture Capital Association, India's oldest and largest association of VC and PE firms. In addition, she helped the creation of Lankan Angel Network in Sri Lanka. She contributed actively in the Planning Commission’s Committee on “Angel & Early Stage Investing in India” which resulted in a seminal report: “Creating a Vibrant Entrepreneurial Eco system in India”. She is on the Committee of Telecom Centre of Excellence, Selection Committee of MSME and is actively engaged with the various committees of Ministry of Finance, SEBI, etc.

Padmaja is nationally recognised as a key player in the Indian entrepreneurial ecosystem and has helped co-found many of the relevant institutions, besides being an active Angel investor herself. Her operating experience spans large corporates, M&A, and start-ups/early stage companies. She has been awarded as one of the 'Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Business' by Fortune India and has been listed in Forbes India’s W-Power Trailblazers and ‘30 Most Powerful Women in India’ by Business Today.

Sunil Mishra

Sunil specializes in fund selection, due diligence, negotiations, and monitoring of Asian investments ex?China, specifically in India, Australia, Japan, Southeast Asia, and Korea. He also actively participates in all fund investment decisions and is involved in the sourcing, screening, execution, monitoring, and exiting of growth and buyout co?investments.

Prior to joining Adams Street, Sunil worked for Standard Chartered Bank in Singapore performing financial and business analyses of local and regional companies. Previously, Sunil worked in India as an Investment and Strategy Associate in Tacogroup, the automotive technology and engineering investment arm of the Tata Group of India, where he worked on business planning, feasibility studies, and localization plans for new ventures.

Sunil manages relationships with several of Adams Street’s managers and sits on advisory boards of more than a dozen private equity firms within the Adams Street Partners portfolio. He is currently Vice?Chairman of the Singapore Venture Capital and Private Equity Association (SVCA) and has been a member of the SVCA Board since 2016.

Sunil is a member of Adams Street’s Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Committee.