Women remain a minority in India's private equity and venture capital sectors. But the ones in the game are ensuring opportunities and access to others
[Clockwise] Harsha Kumar, partner, Lightspeed India; Nupur Garg, founder of WinPE; Anjali Sosale, partner, WaterBridge Ventures; Roshini Bakshi, managing director, PE, Everstone Capital; Alka Goel, founding partner, Alkemi Growth Capital; Lavanya Ashok, partner, Trifecta Capital
Nupur Garg, founder of WinPE
“Gender diversity is a complex and nuanced challenge that has been precipitated through decades of practices and beliefs, which we also know as gender stereotypes and unconscious bias,” says Nupur Garg, founder of WinPE, a not-for-profit initiative to enhance gender diversity in the investing ecosystem. PE/VC started as an all-male industry, much like many others, but while other industries have seen change, Garg reasons that PE/VC has been held back by notions like men are better at managing finance and the cause-effect cycle of having fewer women in the ecosystem, which leads to fewer women in leadership roles. Among the reasons that have traditionally been ascribed for lower participation of women in PE/VC are the long working hours and frequent travel. But Lavanya Ashok does not fall into that bucket. While she has spent 16 years in finance and investing, her journey began when she went to Wharton to study economics. She started at Goldman Sachs as an analyst, where she executed multiple transactions spanning equity financing, and mergers and acquisitions. After Goldman she joined in an investing role at SPO Partners, a Silicon Valley hedge fund, where Ashok claims, “I started to fall in love with the process of investing, taking disparate data points, crafting a narrative and building conviction around what makes a great investment.”Lavanya Ashok, partner, Trifecta CapitalShe then went to Stanford Graduate School of Business to get an MBA and rejoined Goldman as employee number three in the growth equity investing team in Mumbai. Over the decade, Ashok became managing director for PE. She focussed on investments across sectors, including technology, financial services, consumer, health care and logistics, was responsible for multiple investments and executed over $1 billion in completed exits.Last October, she joined Trifecta Capital as a general partner. Trifecta Capital is one of the early venture debt funds in India, and last year it started an equity growth fund alongside its existing debt fund. Ashok is responsible for all aspects of its business, which includes working with founding partners Nilesh Kothari and Rahul Khanna on team building, capital formation, investing and portfolio construction, monitoring portfolio companies and delivering returns. During the pandemic, she was part of the lead team that raised nearly ₹1,300 crore for its growth equity fund and officially announced four deals, and is soon signing two or three more.Alka Goel, founding partner, Alkemi Growth Capital; Image: Madhu Kapparath
Goel, who graduated from IIM-Ahmedabad in 2000, joined McKinsey and by 2003-04 moved to its New York office. “And pretty much fell in love with health care,” she says, having launched Alkemi Growth Capital in 2018, a $40 million health care and consumption dedicated fund. “I started some of my projects in health care, and saw the huge impact it has on everyone’s life. I built on the PE background at McKinsey itself, and became a partner quite early at McKinsey.” She also worked on emerging markets like Latin America, India, Southeast Asia, Russia and Turkey. But she always kept track of what was happening in India, and as more data kept surfacing about the buoyancy of Indian markets, she knew she had to move.Roshini Bakshi, managing director, PE, Everstone Capital
Anjali Sosale, partner, WaterBridge Ventures; Image: Balaji Gangadharan for Forbes India