Ravi Venkatesan
Business Leader, Author, and social entrepreneur in Bengaluru, India
Ravi Venkatesan is the Chairman of The Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP) launched at COP26 with USD10 billion of committed capital to accelerate investment in green energy transitions and renewable energy solutions. He is also UNICEF’s Special Representative for Young People and Innovation and the Founder of the Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME).
He serves on the Boards of Rockefeller Foundation, Hitachi Ltd and is a partner at impact investor Unitus Ventures..
Ravi has spent three decades leading organizations in the private sector, public sector and social sector, across three continents and multiple industries. He is a former Chairman of the Bank of Baroda; between 2015-18, he led 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. Between 2004-11, as Chairman & CEO of Microsoft India, Ravi helped build India into Microsoft's second-largest presence in the world and the most respected multinational company in India. From 1997-2004, Ravi served as the Chairman of Cummins India and led its transformation into India’s leading provider of engines and power generation solutions. He has served on the boards of Harvard Business School, AB Volvo, Strand Lifesciences, JCB, ATREE and Thermax.
Ravi is the founder of Social Venture Partners India, a pan-India network of philanthropists. He was instrumental in creating Microsoft India’s Project Shiksha, the world’s largest computer literacy program and 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. Ravi is the author of two bestselling books, ‘What The Heck Do I Do With My Life: How To Flourish in Our Turbulent Times’and Conquering the Chaos: Win in India, Win Everywhere."
Ravi was voted as one of India's best management thinkers by Thinkers50 and is one of LinkedIn's Global Influencers. He was voted Microsoft's AlumniHERO 2020.