Imran Jafar

Imran is a Managing Partner at Gaja Capital. Gaja is India’s leading mid-market growth capital firm. Gaja’s aim is to help create India’s next generation of market leaders in sectors such as Education, Consumer, Financial Services and Healthcare.

Imran has 19 years of experience in Private Equity, Pharmaceuticals and Technology services. Prior to Gaja, Imran worked in a variety of roles of increasing responsibility at Dr. Reddy’s and Wipro Technologies.

At Gaja, Imran leads investments in the Education and Consumer clusters. He has been closely involved with Gaja’s investments in Educational Initiatives (Ed-Tech), Kangaroo Kids (Pre-K and K-12), KOOH Sports (Performance Sports), SportzVillage (Youth Sports), EuroKids (Pre-K and K12), John Distilleries (AlcoBev), CL Educate (Supplemental Education) and Indus World Schools (K12).

Imran has post graduate degrees in software engineering from BITS-Pilani and an MBA from IIM-Bangalore. 

Prashant Mehta

Prashant is a Partner at Lightbox, a Mumbai based venture capital firm investing in consumer technology companies. 

After an MBA at Wharton, Prashant began his career in finance at Lehman Brothers where he understood the art of investing in emerging markets. Keen to learn more about how technology was changing the world, he moved to Silicon Valley to join Yahoo where he led commercial operations that generated over $150 million in annual revenue.

Having seen the promise of technology in emerging markets, Prashant and his family moved to Mumbai in the midst of the world financial crisis to lead an early stage technology start up – Komli Media. Over the next five years, first as COO and then as CEO, Prashant led an incredibly talented team to position Komli as Asia’s leading advertising technology company. Along the way, they grew revenues 50x and expanded into 10 new international markets.

In 2014, Prashant joined Lightbox. Most recently, he led the $185MM investment commitment from Reliance in AI-platform Embibe. This is the largest AI investment in education any where in the world.

Prachi Windlass

Prachi is a director at Michael & Susan Dell Foundation India LLP. As a member of the leadership team, she manages a portfolio of start-ups, NGOs and large-scale government partnerships. Prachi is on the board of several for-profit education companies and advisory committees to state governments and education departments. She is passionate about the area of data driven education and has spearheaded the foundation’s work in multiple ways, including: incubating service providers, creating role model states for classroom based assessments and embedding student learning based accountability in all portfolio companies.

Before joining the foundation, she orked at Boston Consulting Group in Gurgaon, India and in the telecommunications sector at Qualcomm and Motorola in US. Prachi has a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, a master’s degree from University of Southern California, Los Angeles and MBA from the University of Chicago

Puneet Kothapa

Neeraj Sharma

Neeraj Sharma is a Chartered accountant and Cost accountant with 21 years of rich experience across industries. He joined the company in October 2012 from Fullerton India Credit Company Ltd. where he served as Senior Vice President & Head Treasury.

Prior to Fullerton, he worked with AIG Consumer Finance, Ballarpur Industries, Fibcom India (Tellabs JV), Bridgestone India and ACC Limited in various capacities.

V Sivaramakrishnan

Sivaramakrishnan Venkateswaran (Siva) is the Managing Director of Oxford University Press (OUP) ? India Branch, with regional responsibilities including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and the Middle East.

Siva has extensive experience in the Education Services, e?commerce, automobile and FMCG domains. In his previous assignment, Siva was Executive President – Education Services at Manipal Global Education Services (MaGE), one the country’s largest privately owned higher education and training services providers. In his seven plus years at MaGE, he successfully led teams to deliver strong business development, improve quality assurance, and expand education and training delivery with supporting technology platforms.

Siva’s wide?ranging work experience includes running a successful online news, shopping, and gaming portal. He also spent nearly ten years with the Ford Motor Company?including me based in the UK and US?and held various consumer branding roles within Proctor and Gamble.

Siva is a member of the FICCI Higher Education Committee and in the past years has been on the CII Primary Education Council.

He holds a Bachelor in Engineering degree from Bangalore University and is a Post Graduate in Business Management from the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT), New Delhi. Siva is a sports enthusiast and follows cricket and soccer keenly. He also likes to watch movies in his spare time.

Sivaramakrishnan Venkateswaran (Siva) is the Managing Director of Oxford University Press (OUP) ? India Branch, with regional responsibilities including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and the Middle East.

Siva has extensive experience in the Education Services, e?commerce, automobile and FMCG domains. In his previous assignment, Siva was Executive President – Education Services at Manipal Global Education Services (MaGE), one the country’s largest privately owned higher education and training services providers. In his seven plus years at MaGE, he successfully led teams to deliver strong business development, improve quality assurance, and expand education and training delivery with supporting technology platforms.

Siva’s wide?ranging work experience includes running a successful online news, shopping, and gaming portal. He also spent nearly ten years with the Ford Motor Company?including me based in the UK and US?and held various consumer branding roles within Proctor and Gamble.

Siva is a member of the FICCI Higher Education Committee and in the past years has been on the CII Primary Education Council.

He holds a Bachelor in Engineering degree from Bangalore University and is a Post Graduate in Business Management from the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT), New Delhi. Siva is a sports enthusiast and follows cricket and soccer keenly. He also likes to watch movies in his spare time.

Zishaan Hayath

Zishaan graduated from IIT Bombay in 2005 with a masters degree in Civil Engineering. His career started with Indian FMCG giant ITC Limited. He later worked with consulting firm Opera Solutions to advise Fortune 100 clients across North America, Europe and Asia. In 2008, Zishaan co-founded Chaupati.com, an e-commerce marketplace, which was acquired by Future Group. He co-founded Toppr in 2013. Today, Toppr is India’s leading online learning app with over 5MM students.

Vamsi Krishna

Vamsi Krishna is Co-founder of Vedantu, an Ed-Tech startup that offers personalized Live Online Tutoring. Vamsi co-founded Vedantu along with his friends. These are childhood friends who started their first venture in education in 2006 called Lakshya, a Test Prep company in rural Punjab which got acquired by MTEducare, a listed company, in 2012. Vedantu is their second venture together in education. Vedantu was established with the vision of creating a world of learning that is personalized and democratized.

Vamsi completed his B. Tech. from IIT-Bombay in the year 2005 and has been a teacher for more than 6 years. At Vedantu, Vamsi primarily looks after strategy & product roadmap and oversees critical functions like Branding & Marketing. Under his leadership, Vedantu raised USD 5 million in Series A round of funding within just six months of its launch from marquee investors such as Accel Partners and Tiger Global. He has been invited to speak at prestigious conferences such as TEDx Walled City and KINSES 2016 where he presented as one of the winners of EduAwards 2016.

An amateur photographer you can find him clicking in his free time.

Namita Dalmia

Namita is a principal at Omidyar Network where she leads education investments in India.  Prior to joining Omidyar Network, Namita spent five years as associate director at Central Square Foundation, where she led the education technology vertical. She helped to incubate and invest in non-profit organizations and partnered with the government.

Previously, Namita was a design analyst at Education Elements, working closely with the engineering and consulting team to design a hybrid learning management system.Before Education Elements, she worked with the National Knowledge Commission, supporting the Prime Minister’s Office to develop policy encompassing education and related areas.

Namita received her MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and received a dual degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology.

Priya Krishnan

Priya Krishnan is the CEO of one of the most prestigious and trustworthy prep school and day care brands in India. Set up under Founding Years – A multi platform education services organization, KLAY Prep Schools and Daycare in India, caters to children in the age group of 6 months to 10 years.

A business graduate from London Business School, and having worked in various leadership positions with companies like Anderson Consulting and PWC, Priya moved from UK to India with the desire of starting a chain of high quality and trustworthy day care centres in emerging urban hubs which would offer parents and children unparalleled education and care. Her passion to make a difference in the education world was also driven by her vision of enabling women to get back to work by creating learning spaces where they could leave their children on their way to work.

Founded in 2011, KLAY sets the standard for Early Childhood Education - an unforgettable experience of independent learning, creative thinking and strong values for your little one! A proud supporter of women who want to get back to work but have limited options, they have enabled more than 20,000 women and supported them as they pursue their careers.

With over 110 centres and more than 200 corporate tie-ups, they pride themselves on their personalized approach to education and care and are working relentlessly to expand the KLAY footprint across India and to Singapore and Dubai. Under Priya’s leadership, KLAY, has been the recipient of many prestigious awards from Brands Academy, Education Today and Silicon India, for its contributions in the field of education and child care.

A quintessential example of a driven, focused and successful woman entrepreneur, Priya has been recognized as a visionary CEO and trendsetter who defines the framework for this nascent industry.

Pranjal Kumar

Pranjal Kumar is currently the Principal at Bertelsmann India Investments and Corporate Centre. He leads portfolio management for our investee companies, as well as steers investments in the education sector. In his Corporate Center role, he supports Bertelsmann’s divisions in evaluating the investing landscape and helping them execute growth / expansion plans.

Pranjal has a professional career of around 14 years, where he has spearheaded several strategic and operations related assignments across telecom, media, retail, consumer goods and real estate. His domain expertise lies in shaping growth strategy and its operationalization (market assessment & entry, supply market analysis, go-to-market and functional strategy, strategic due diligence / post-merger integration) and in driving large-scale operational excellence programs (efficiency improvement programs, organization structure & re-design).

He started his career with an Indian Oil major, and after his management diploma worked with multiple top-tier management consulting firms i.e. A.T Kearney, Accenture, KPMG and Tata Strategic Management Group.

Pranjal holds a Post-Graduate Diploma in Management from Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIM Bangalore) and a Bachelor’s degree in Technology from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IIT Delhi).

Sanjay Dalmia

Arjun Nair

Arjun Nair is a co-founder at Great Learning. Having launched and scaled new programs online and at centers across India, he is an ardent believer in the power of technology to consistently deliver high quality learning experiences and transform the lives.

Arjun has been part of the leadership at a number of VC funded startups in the US and India. Prior to Great Learning, he headed Strategic Initiatives at ZipDial, which was acquired by Twitter. Arjun completed his MBA from MIT Sloan where he received the prestigious Legatum Fellowship awarded to entrepreneurs from emerging markets. He received an MS from Duke University and has worked on building products and scaling operations at Siemens for a number of  years before his entrepreneurial journey. 

Bhola Meena

Bhola is a computer science graduate from IIT Kanpur. He is an Ex-Microsoft professional and a serial entrepreneur of GetMeCab.com - First online Taxi booking services in India , HinKhoj.com - Largest community of Hindi Translation in India, OnlineTyari.com - Leader in Test preparation for Government recruitments. He is currently the CEO & Founder at OnlineTyari.com.

Bhola is a computer science graduate from IIT Kanpur. He is an Ex-Microsoft professional and a serial entrepreneur of GetMeCab.com - First online Taxi booking services in India , HinKhoj.com - Largest community of Hindi Translation in India, OnlineTyari.com - Leader in Test preparation for Government recruitments. He is currently the CEO & Founder at OnlineTyari.com.

Jitin Sethi

Jitin Sethi a partner at L.E.K. Consulting’s Global Education Practice. He is a founding member and leader of the GEP. Jitin has delivered education cases across the globe, and has extensive experience across all education segments, including K-12, Higher Education, Transnational Education, English Language Training, Education Technology and Corporate Training.

Jitin is focused on the education work in emerging markets, where he has advised leading clients and investors on marquee deals. He works closely with private equity clients, tertiary institutions and school companies on investment opportunities, full potential assessment, business plan development, pricing uplift opportunity, and go-to-market strategy. Jitin holds a Bachelor’s of Engineering from Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University and an MBA from the Indian School of Business.

Smita Sircar

Smita leads Gray Matters Capital’s education focused innovation and ecosystem building work out of India. She currently helms edLABS that provides very early stage funding to ‘visionary edu-preneurs’ to build disruptive solutions to education problems. She also builds collaboration with wider ecosystem players towards finding affordable and relevant solutions to quality education.

Prior to Gray Matters Capital, Smita has lived and worked in Africa, Asia, Europe and US. She headed the Research and Performance Management for Community Banking with Standard Bank (South Africa). She was in the start-up team of transformational consultancy Volans(UK) and held multiple roles with India’s largest private sector bank ICICI Bank.

Raj Gilda

Raj Gilda is a banker turned social entrepreneur and co-Founder of Lend A Hand India, an NGO focused on providing vocational education as part of high school curriculum across India. He has worked across Asia, Europe and North America. Prior to leaving corporate sector in 2011 to focus full time on Lend A Hand India, he spent ten years in New York working with Citibank and Deloitte Consulting.

Raj is a former General Body member of National Skill Development Agency (NSDA) appointed by Gov of India. His team currently works across 22 states in India providing technical and project management support to state governments to scale up vocational education in the state. He was also selected by the UK Government, as a Chevening Gurukul Scholar (2012) at the London School of Economics. He is Electronics Engineer from University of Pune and MBA from University of Texas at Austin.

Sonam Shah

Ms. Sonam Shah – Preschool Head of Garodia’s Academy, for over a decade, has done her Masters in Human Development (from the College of Home Science, Nirmala Niketan). She has been instrumental in developing curriculum for Beehive – Franchise Preschool by Garodia Education and has been managing Garodia Academy’s Department of Early Childhood Education – a preschool teacher-training program.

A child at heart she is passionate about being with kids and envisions children to become independent thinkers and self – motivated learners.

Amit Kapoor

Amit has more than 15 years’ experience in sales and marketing across Education, Training & Entertainment industries covering Indian and International markets. His stints at NIIT, Palador Pictures, Centum Learning, Across World Education and Encyclopaedia Britannica have been focussed on Sales, market entry and growth strategies coupled with a focus on business development.

In his last assignment, Amit was Director - Digital Sales at Encyclopaedia Britannica South Asia. He holds PGDM from T.A. Pai Management Institute, Manipal.

Amit Mahensaria

Amit Mahensaria, Co-Founder & CEO of Impartus Innovations, India is an IIT Delhi and IIM Lucknow alumnus and has been associated with the education sector for more than 10 years, earlier as a venture capital investor as now as an entrepreneur.

Through Impartus, Amit is bringing videos into mainstream learning; and thereby creating an impact for students and teachers alike. Impartus is a video platform for creation and online distribution of classroom videos and is a clear market leader in its space in India and has also expanded to Asia Pacific.

Before co-founding Impartus, Amit worked as an Investment Manager at IDFC Private Equity and has led numerous education, infrastructure and technology projects in India and abroad. He is passionate about technology innovations and Impartus is his 2nd entrepreneurial venture in the ed-tech domain.

Ashish Aggarwal

Ashish is Founder and CFO of Footprints Childcare Pvt Ltd. Ashish has experience in Banking, Wealth Management and Software sectors and in his last assignment, he was working with Citibank in Japan.

Ashish is an alumnus of IIT Delhi and IIM Calcutta

Sourabh Anand

Sourabh is an Associate Partner at Social Finance India, a not-for-profit set up with the aim of scaling outcome-focused interventions through innovative financing. He is a part of the founding team and is working on designing and operationalizing the India Education Outcomes Fund (IEOF), a first-of-its-kind outcomes fund that will crowd in and disburse $1 billion to improve education outcomes in India by 2030.

Prior to joining Social Finance, Sourabh has worked in various roles at IDFC Bank, Deloitte Consulting, and GE Capital. His work over the last decade has largely focused around consulting in the areas of infrastructure development and finance, including advising govt. agencies on structuring public-private partnerships (PPPs). At IDFC Bank, he was involved in designing and rolling out their CSR programmes in education, health, and livelihoods development.

Sourabh has also supported high-level committees and task forces set up by the Govt. of India for policy development in the infrastructure sector including the National Transport Development Policy Committee and the Expert Group for Modernization of Indian Railways. He completed his bachelor’s in commerce from Delhi University and post-graduation in management from the Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar.

Sridevi Raghavan

Krishna Kumar

Krishna Kumar re-imagines education for working professionals. He strongly feels that technology can be used to make learning more accessible and to personalize learner experience for students. An entrepreneur at heart, Krishna believes in continual improvement and the need to stay focused on achieving goals. This remains the guiding philosophy at Simplilearn. Krishna focuses on accelerating growth and guiding an end-to-end strategy to advance Simplilearn's position in high-growth markets.

Before Simplilearn, Krishna was the Co-founder and COO at TechUnified – a software product company which he exited successfully in 2007 after selling it to a publicly held company. Krishna earned his Bachelor of Engineering degree from NIT, Surathkal, India. A fitness enthusiast, Krishna enjoys long runs outdoors and is passionate about teaching.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta

Pratap Bhanu Mehta is Vice-Chancellor, Ashoka University. He was previously President, Center for Policy Research. He has been a Professor at Harvard, JNU, the Global Faculty Program at NYU Law School. He has published widely in political theory, constitutional law, society and politics in India, governance and political economy, and international affairs.

His most recent publications include The Oxford Handbook to the Indian Constitution (co-edited with Madhav Khosla and Sujit Choudhary); Rethinking India's Public Institutions (with Devesh Kapur and Milan Vaishnav); Non-Alignment 2.0 (with Srinath Raghavan, Sunil Khilnani et al), The Oxford Companion to Politics in India (with Niraja Jayal); India and Multilateralism (with Bruce Jones and WPS Sidhu) and the Burden of Democracy.

Mehta has also served in a number of policy roles including, Member Convenor of the Prime Minister of India's National Knowledge Comission, Member of the the National Security Advisory Board, Member of the Lyngdoh Committee. He Chairs the Jury for the Holberg Prize.

Mehta has a prolific engagement with public affairs. He is editorial consultant to Indian Express, where he writes a regular column. In addition he has written for the Financial Times, and a number of leading national and international publications. He is on the Editorial Board of American Political Science Review and Journal of Democracy.

Dr Mehta holds a BA (first class) in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Oxford and a PhD in politics from Princeton. He received the 2010 Malcom S. Adishehshiah Award and the 2011 Infosys Prize for Social Sciences - Political Science.

Nirav Khambhati

Nirav is a Partner at Kaizen Private Equity, Asia’s first and only fund exclusively focused on education.

Prior to joining Kaizen, Nirav was with the Tata Group for over 20 years in various capacities including as the Chief Executive Officer of Tata ClassEdge and Tata Interactive Systems, Vice President – Chairman’s Office, and Head Telecom Practice – TCS, Asia Pacific. Nirav has led several international projects and collaborations in the fields of telecommunications and aerospace, and served as Director on the Boards of companies within and outside India.

Nirav is an Engineer and MBA (Gold Medalist). He was one of the twelve mid-career professionals selected by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the UK for the first batch of the Chevening Rolls-Royce Science and Innovation Leadership Programme at the University of Oxford.

Nirav was recognized as a Young India Leader by the British High Commission in 2013. In 2016, Jagran Lakecity University conferred upon him an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Arts (Management) for his contributions in the space of management, education and technology. Nirav is a member of the Confederation of Indian Industry’s Council for Primary Education.

Ravijot Chugh

Ravijot Chugh is the co-founder and heads the product and learning experience at UpGrad. He has previously worked with Housing.com as a product lead and with the Parthenon Group advising multiple companies and private equity investors on the education sector in emerging markets. He also co-founded a social travel startup called 36hrs.in in San Francisco

Ravi holds a Bachelors degree in Computer Science from IIT-Delhi and was part of the Forbes Asia 30 under 30 cohort for 2018.

Ravijot Chugh is the co-founder and heads the product and learning experience at UpGrad. He has previously worked with Housing.com as a product lead and with the Parthenon Group advising multiple companies and private equity investors on the education sector in emerging markets. He also co-founded a social travel startup called 36hrs.in in San Francisco

Ravi holds a Bachelors degree in Computer Science from IIT-Delhi and was part of the Forbes Asia 30 under 30 cohort for 2018.

Rohit Manglik

Rohit Manglik is an NIT graduate and is past Fortune 500 companies such as Oracle, Morgan Stanley and DE Shaw. He is the youngest educationist to speak at the 11th World Education Summit, Dubai. He was a speaker in a number of events such as VCCircle Education Investment Summit, Indian School Awards 2017, Businessworld Growth Leadership Conclave and Awards, CX Summit etc. Rohit Manglik is one of the top 10 most influential educational leaders of the country. His interviews have been featured in more than 100 national/international media houses. Leading journals, magazines & newspapers have published his articles on topics ranging from education to technology. With his venture EduGorilla, Rohit Manglik has been revolutionizing the educational landscape in India. 

Mayank Kumar

Mayank Kumar is the Founder and CEO of UpGrad (www.upgrad.com), India’s first full-fledged online education company. Mayank co-founded UpGrad together with serial entrepreneur and philanthropist Ronnie Screwvala and secured $16m of capital to grow the venture into India’s most meaningful education business.

Before founding UpGrad, Mayank was Vice President Education at Bertelsmann, Europe’s largest media and education conglomerate, where he oversaw Bertelsmann’s education strategy and its multi-million dollar investments in India. In this capacity, Mayank further served as Board Member of iNurture (www.inurture.com), India’s No. 1 provider of industry-specific academic programs.

Prior to joining Bertelsmann, Mayank was a Senior Principal at The Parthenon Group, where he advised global clients in the education sector across all geographies including China, Southeast Asia,
India and South America and participated in deals worth $1.5bn flowing into the education sector.

Before joining The Parthenon Group, Mayank worked at the Tata Strategic Management Group, advising Tata’s strategic direction. Mayank holds a BTech from IIT Delhi and a MBA from Indian School of Business (ISB).

Lopa Gandhi

Lopa Gandhi has over 15 years of experience in the field of education. She is the Founder of Ugam Education Foundation (June 2015) and Education Indeed Consultants. She has a Masters degree and has experience in teaching adolescents, curriculum design and development, HR management and coaching of NGO and government school teachers  and Head Masters.

She was a teacher, Principal Coach and Head of HR at the Akanksha Foundation. She has been involved as a Master Coach and a senior design team member with the Kaivalya Education Foundation in Mumbai. She led Muktangan as a Project Director. She has worked with many NGOs and is a trustee at Antarang Foundation and a managing committee member at Aarohi.

Rohit Manglik

Srikrishna Ramamoorthy

Srikrishna Ramamoorthy is a Partner with Unitus Seed Fund. He brings both entrepreneurial and investing perspectives with extensive experience in impact investing and BoP start-ups. Srikrishna joined Unitus Seed Fund in 2012 to setup and lead India operations for the fund. With 23 investments to date, Unitus Seed Fund is the leading venture seed fund supporting startups innovating for the masses in India.