Padma Chandrasekaran

Sponsor

Investment Committee Member

Biography

Padma Chandrasekaran has 25+ years of very rich experience as an entrepreneur, technologist, prolific investor, and an operations expert in multiple industries including healthcare, life sciences, analytics, IT, alternative energy, education, in both the for-profit and not-for-profit world.

As an investor she has invested across stages including Start Up, Early Growth, Expansion stage companies and has seen full cycle investments from inception through exits. As a founding member, Padma has also taken a company public on NASDAQ in the United States.

She has also invested in five (seed to private equity stage) funds including funds of Fulcrum, Unitus Ventures, TVS Capital. She is on the Advisory Board of Unitus Ventures.

Padma’s investment strategy is very studied and has delivered impressive returns with her best investment returning 11.1X (unrealized gains) and 8.3X (realized gains) times invested capital.

She is an Executive Committee member of The Chennai Angels (www.thechennaiangels.com), an angel investing group, and an charter member and member of the core leadership team (for 4 years) of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TIE) Chennai (http://chennai.tie.org/), a non-profit dedicated to promoting entrepreneurship.

As an entrepreneur, Padma has experienced first-hand the challenges and opportunities of building companies in India. She co-founded Virgil Tech (P) Limited a platform-oriented software services company in early 2001 and successfully exited to a strategic acquirer in 2003.

Additionally, Padma was one of the 4 founding members of Sify Ltd, India’s first Internet company and part of the team that took it public on NASDAQ in 1999.

As a proponent of investing in Positive Impact - Padma has operated in the not-for-profit world and understands intimately the critical elements of creating sustainable impact for large-scale programs. Between 2003 and 2011, she worked full-time for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She held responsibilities for strategy development, program implementation, impact evaluation and research in HIV prevention, maternal and child care and vaccine development and delivery. While there were many initiatives she led, one of her signature accomplishments was creating a multidimensional evaluation strategy of the $250 million program being executed by the Gates Foundation. The strategy was hugely successful in that for the first time the Foundation and the Government of India got a picture of what the $250 million investment achieved. More importantly the evaluation strategy became a global case study because of the associated publication strategy. The original paper is listed in her LinkedIn paper and continues to be highly cited for large scale (eg Government) program evaluations. Upon leaving Gates Foundation in 2011 as full-time employee, Padma consulted for the Gates foundation on various issues and continued to be on a few of their advisory boards till end of 2016.

As a senior advisor and board member, Padma is very sought after change maker. She was on the board of CAMS (Computer Aided Management Systems) and Sterling Software between 2013 and 2018 and drove significant value addition through robust board participation. She continues to be a trustee of Algolabs, the AI / machine learning initiative of the Chennai Mathematical Institute.

As a thought leader, Padma has spoken at many forums including Madras Management Association, Startup Grind, ICTACT (ICT Academy of Tamil Nadu) Annual Polestar Awards for Business and IT. She has authored several highly cited peer reviewed publications in academic journals such as The Lancet and the British Medical Journal.

Padma began her career in IT / Internet sector at ICIM / ICL UK working in Mumbai, Pune, UK and the Bay Area.

Padma holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics/Statistics from the University of Calcutta; an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad and an MBA with specialization in Telecommunications from the University of San Francisco, California.