Padma Chandrasekaran is an angel investor actively seeking opportunities to invest in promising young startups. She has worked in senior and executive-level positions for 18 years in the for-profit and 8 years in the non-profit and research sectors in India and abroad.
Padma’s private sector experience (1984-2003) followed a standard gradient of developer, manager, executive officer, and entrepreneur in the IT sector in India, the US, and the UK. She was a founding member of Sify Ltd and part of the team that took it public on NASDAQ in 1999. She subsequently founded, ran, and then successfully sold a web services software technology company.
Between 2003 and 2011, she worked for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where she held responsibilities for strategy development, program management, and impact evaluation in various areas of health technologies and services (e.g., vaccine development and delivery) and human development (e.g., water and sanitation, agriculture). She continues to consult for the foundation and other international health tech and research organizations.
Since mid-2012, Padma has pursued opportunities in angel investing. She is a member of The Chennai Angels. Her current angel investment interests include biotech, health, and clean energy. She is on the advisory board of a mobile technology company enabling logistics and supply chain management for essential drugs, vaccines, and devices.
Padma holds a Bachelor’s degree in Statistics from Presidency College, Calcutta; an MBA (PGP 1984) from IIM Ahmedabad, and a Master’s degree in Telecommunications from the University of San Francisco, California. She has authored several highly cited peer-reviewed publications in premier, high impact journals such as The Lancet and the BMJ.
Padma is considered slightly-nerdy by friends and colleagues, and outside work, likes frittering away the time reading and discussing completely inconsequential things such as economics, science, and technology, philosophy, history, and science fiction. She is also an ardent fan of both systems of Indian classical music.
