Ravi Venkatesan

Board Chair of the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet
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Ravi joins the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet as Board Chair.

Ravi is UNICEF’s Special Representative for Young People & Innovation, and he is also the founder of the Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME), a coalition which aims to create 10m local entrepreneurs in India and Africa by 2030.

Ravi is a former Chairman of the Bank of Baroda; between 2015-18, he oversaw the turnaround of India’s second largest public sector bank. As a board member then Co-Chairman of Infosys Ltd., he helped steer the company through a challenging set of transitions. Prior to this, as Chairman of Microsoft India, Ravi helped build India into Microsoft’s second-largest presence in the world. He was previously the Chairman of Cummins India and led its transformation into India’s leading provider of engines and power generation solutions. Ravi has served on the boards of Harvard Business School, AB Volvo, Bunge and Thermax and is a Trustee of Rockefeller Foundation.

Ravi is the founder of Social Venture Partners India, a pan-India network of philanthropists and is a partner at impact investor Unitus Ventures. He was instrumental in creating Microsoft India’s Project Shiksha, a computer literacy program which has so far trained over 40 million school children in India. He also helped establish the Cummins College of Engineering, India’s first engineering college for women, in Pune.

Ravi has a BTech from IIT Bombay, an MS from Purdue University, and an MBA from Harvard Business School where he was a Baker Scholar. He is a recipient of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay’s Distinguished Alumnus Award and Purdue University’s Distinguished Engineering Alumnus Award. He is the author of an acclaimed book “Conquering the Chaos: Win in India, Win Everywhere” published by Harvard Business Review.

Ravi was voted as one of India’s best management thinkers by Thinkers50 and is one of Linkedin’s Global Influencers.