People & Partners

Agri Accelerator

Akshay Soni

Akshay leads the Saamuhika Shakti, a first of its kind collective impact initiative, where nine implementing organizations have joined forces to enable informal waste pickers to have greater agency to lead secure and dignified lives. He has previously led the marketing function and the accelerator product at The/Nudge. Prior to that, he spent 18 years in the capital markets focussed on equity analysis across various sectors (IT services, cement, hotels, shipping, construction, infrastructure, capital goods and real estate) along with thematic research to shape industry thought processes. Akshay was in the past, Executive Director at Morgan Stanley and holds an MBA from XLRI, Jamshedpur.

COO, The/Nudge Institute The/Nudge InSight, NEST

Amit Gupta

Amit Gupta is COO of the The/Nudge Institute. In this role, he is responsible for various horizontal functions such as finance, strategy, people & culture, impact and technology. Amit has over two decades of global experience in strategy, transformation and business finance. He has successfully led execution of many high-stakes business growth and turnaround initiatives for companies operating at the cutting edge of technology. He has worked in a diverse set of business contexts – be it an early stage start-up, or a high-growth scale-up company, or a Fortune 500 industry leader, or management consultancy firms. Amit is an alumnus of IIT, Roorkee and the University of Texas at Austin.

Finance

Ashish Shetty

Ashish is Director of Finance & Legal, India. He has 20+ years’ diverse experience as a Finance professional including controllership, business planning, compliance and internal audit. Prior to The/Nudge, Ashish worked at Target, Hutchison Telecom and DHL where he was involved in developing high performing teams, creating robust control environments and implementing strategies for enhancing revenue, controlling costs and driving operations excellence in Companies across different countries. Ashish is a qualified accountant with memberships of ICAI (India) and ACCA (UK) and a B.Com from University of Mumbai.

Founder & CEO, The/Nudge Institute

Atul Satija

Atul Satija is the Founder & CEO of The/Nudge Institute. After 17 years of starting, scaling and turning around various businesses in some of the largest and most respected organisations globally, he decided to start The/Nudge Institute to fulfill his passion of working on inequality and social issues facing India. Previously at his 5-year stint at InMobi, Atul helped scale the organisation from a small start-up to a global leader in mobile advertising. Prior to InMobi, Atul was the Head of Mobile Business for Japan & Asia-Pacific, and Head of Business Development for India at Google. Atul has also done various sales, consulting and business development assignments across telecom and technology companies including Adobe, Samsung and Infosys.

Refarm

Gitanjali Rajamani

Gitanjali Rajamani heads a Direct Implementation program in Agriculture at The/Nudge Institute. She is passionate about climate resilient regenerative agriculture and is working on solutions that would yield a sustainable income increase for small and marginal farmers at scale. Gitanjali is a 2X Entrepreneur having founded Farmizen, which is a farm to fork marketplace for Organic produce and GreenMyLife which is into creating sustainable landscapes. Gitanjali comes with 22+ years of work experience and has previously worked with corporates such as TCS, leading large-scale operations for Big Pharma clients GSK, Astra Zeneca, JnJ for their Clinical Research services. Gitanjali has a Masters in International Management and is an alum of the Indian School of Business’ Goldman Sachs 10000 program and the Ambassador program. She was also the winner of the Goldman Sachs and Fortune Global Women Leader award for the year 2018.

The/Nudge Forum

Jerold Pereira

Jerold is a finance professional with 20+ years of experience in launching and scaling operations in sectors such as retail, consumer electronics, real estate and hospitality. He has worked in leadership roles with Indian business groups such as Tata, Piramal, DLF and Videocon before joining a B2B tech-first, scale-up that enables enterprises and education to engage and optimize their workforce and student bodies, respectively. Within The/Nudge Institute, Jerold leads The/Nudge Forum, a platform that helps accelerate problem solving by bringing together stakeholders for collective thought and action for large-scale social change.

Economic Inclusion Program and Asha Kiran

John Paul

John leads Economic Inclusion Program and Asha Kiran at The/Nudge Institute’s Centre for Rural Development. He was previously Head of Product & Innovation for The/Nudge’s Centre for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship building employability programs for underprivileged youth. Before The/Nudge, he has worked in consulting, healthcare and FMCG with organizations such as Frost & Sullivan and Reckitt Benckiser. John is an alumnus of BITS, Pilani and the Indian School of Business (ISB).

The/Nudge Prize

Kanishka Chatterjee

Kanishka leads The/Nudge Prize – A social innovation initiative that bring urgency & scale to stagnant livelihood issues, by inducing for tech-first solutions through grand challenges. Before joining The/Nudge Institute, he spent 16 years in consumer marketing & digital analytics as a consulting and commercial analytics leader. He has worked across Pharma, CPG & BFSI, focused on growth-hacking digital marketing strategy and driving differentiated research & social media insights practices for CXOs/enterprises. He’s worked with Genpact, Clarivate, Axtria and led the marketing analytics portfolio and established new practices in digital transformations. Kanishka has a Bachelor’s in Economics and PGDBM in Marketing from TAPMI, Manipal. He’s also a post graduate public policy student at the Takshashila Institute.

CPO, The/Nudge Institute

Krishna Raghavan 

Krishna Raghavan is Chief People Officer, The/Nudge Institute. His focus is on crafting and implementing a people and culture strategy that enables every Nudgester to live the Nudge Spirit in the pursuit of the organisation’s mission.

With 25 years of experience across Tech and HR, Krishna has served as Chief People Officer at Flipkart, where he spearheaded transformative initiatives that significantly enhanced the employee experience and positioned the company as an employer of choice.

Previously, Krishna has worked with Navi, Cleartrip and Yahoo. In his HR roles, he has led talent acquisition and development, compensation and benefits, organisational design, employee engagement, and diversity and inclusion. Krishna holds a Bachelor’s degree in mathematics from St. Xavier’s College and a B.S, Mathematics, Computer Science from Denison University. 

The Impact Hub

Shefali Bajpai

Shefali is responsible for the Impact Hub at The/Nudge Institute. She took an early plunge into the sector, post her BTech at IIT and a stint at Deloitte and has been at it for more than 14 years. She co-founded Youth Alliance, which works on social entrepreneurship and youth leadership in 2010. Before joining The/Nudge, she also worked with Azim Premji Foundation for four years managing their education programs. She is passionate about poetry, psychology and neuroscience and holds a masters in cognitive neuroscience.

Entrepreneur-in-residence

Sonali Jain

Sonali is an entrepreneur-in-residence at The/Nudge Institute exploring tech-first solutions for building livelihoods. She is passionate about combining the power of technology, social intent and disruptive ideas to solve tough social problems at scale. Before joining The/Nudge, Sonali has served in global leadership roles at Google Cloud, Monitor Deloitte, Infosys across US, Europe, and India. As the head of global consulting partnerships with a multi-billion dollar portfolio, she helped Google Cloud and its partners achieve 10X growth in a hyper-competitive industry. As a leader in Monitor Deloitte’s strategy consulting practice, she helped Fortune 500 technology companies transform to take advantage of market shifts by developing and aligning digital business models, product & go to market strategy, and customer experience. Sonali has completed MBA from HEC, Paris and B.Engg. from Pune University.

Fundraising

Sriram Venkatraman

With 18 years of experience across the corporate and development sector, Sriram leads global partnerships and fundraising at The/Nudge, and has been a member of The/Nudge’s leadership team since its inception in 2015. At The/Nudge, he has led community mobilization for skilling programs, fundraising from foundations, corporates and government besides contributing to the organization’s overall strategy, operations, people practices and culture. Prior to The/Nudge, Sriram led public mobilization and individual fundraising at Amnesty International India after having spent 8 years in healthcare consulting. Sriram, along with his partner, is a signatory of a giving pledge – “Living My Promise” and is an engineer from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani.

Social Entreprenuership

Subhashree Dutta

Subhashree Dutta is the Managing Partner, Social Entrepreneurship at The/Nudge. Subhashree has 30 years’ investing experience in the Asian credit markets across the broad spectrum of credit strategies. She worked with Fiera Capital (Asia) (formerly Clearwater Capital Partners) for about 20 years and her last assignment was as CEO of its Singapore office. She was a member of the Firm’s Investment and Management Committees. She started her career with ICICI Bank in India. Subhashree has a PGDM from IIM Calcutta and is a CFA® charterholder.

Marketing

Vaibhav Budhraja

Vaibhav is the Director and Head, Marketing at the Nudge Institute. In 15 years of his professional journey across diverse organizations (IBM, PepsiCo and HCL Corp.) and sectors(IT, FMCG and Education), he has had the opportunity to create impact in roles spanning Strategy, Marketing and Business Development. Vaibhav has done his Masters in Business Management from IIM Lucknow and Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering from IIT, (ISM) Dhanbad.

Indian Administrative Fellowship

Vivek Sharma

Vivek leads the “Indian Administrative Fellowship” program at The/Nudge. He has over 30 years of experience in Sustainable Development, Financial Management, Business Strategy, ESG and Social Impact Fund. He is an MBA from IIM-Calcutta, a Civil Engineering graduate from IIT–Roorkee and a Fellow of Institution of Engineers (India). He has worked in the Public and Private sector both. He started his career with “Indian Engineering Services” and then moved to the corporate sector wherein he worked at CXO level across companies like Shriram Group, Thermax and Mahindra & Mahindra.