Pawan Mehra
Co-founder and Managing Director

Upendra Bhatt
Co-founder and Managing Director

Rakesh Basant
Professor of Economics and Chairperson- CIIE
IIM, Ahmedabad

Jason Scott
Co-Managing Partner, Encourage Capital

Vishal Goyal
Country Manager- India,
FICO

Pawan Mehra
Co-founder and Managing Director

Pawan Mehra has been involved in building and scaling several ventures. He is a leader who leverages innovation to create capital efficiency. He has been a venture capital investor in his early career and since then has been engaged in creating mission-driven businesses.

Pawan helps architect cKinetics’ programmatic engagements in the fields of clean energy, closed-loop systems and sustainable production. He also leads the design and roll out of newer products and initiatives within the firm. He serves in an advisory capacity to a number of industry working groups and has helped develop newer tools as well as frameworks that have been adopted by the industry (such as a registry for carbon-energy benchmarks, Value Added Water framework, among others).

Pawan also continues to connect Sustainability principles with finance and works with several investor groups. In the past he has served on the guidelines drafting committee for Responsible Banking, has been on the advisory board of the Impact Investing Policy Collaborative, and was on the founding board of the Global Impact Investing Network.

Pawan has a Bachelors Degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering from Delhi College of Engineering and a Master of Business Administration from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He has also spent time at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business in their International Management program. Pawan enjoys long-distance running and meeting real-world heroes. His most precious moments are spent re-learning the finer truths of life from his children.

Upendra Bhatt
Co-founder and Managing Director

Upendra Bhatt (usually called UB) is a ‘Go-to-market’ and techno-commercial specialist with expertise in technology evaluation & linkages. He has been closely associated with developing infrastructure projects in South Asia and has worked on shaping innovative market driven models for mainstreaming of technology and service interventions in the developing markets.

Upendra chairs the Sustainable Business Leadership Forum, an Industry practitioners group focused on resource sustainability and ESG issues through multi-stakeholder working groups. He also serves as the Vice Chair of Alliance for Energy Efficient Economy (AEEE) and is a member of several task forces constituted by industry bodies. He is a frequent speaker at global industry events and adviser to several multi-lateral agencies.

In the past, Upendra has been an early stage investor and co-founder of a development consultancy firm and has also been instrumental in establishing and ramping up the international operations for an Indo-US telecom services firm through its acquisition of a NASDAQ listed firm. He has also held project management roles at Fortune 500 companies, Itochu Corporation and Skanska AB.

Upendra Bhatt has a Masters in International Relations from Thunderbird – The American Graduate School of International Management, a Master of Business Administration from NMIMS-Mumbai, (India) and an Engineering Degree from Delhi College of Engineering (India).

Rakesh Basant
Professor of Economics and Chairperson- CIIE
IIM, Ahmedabad

Rakesh Basant is a Professor of Economics and Chairperson, Center for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) at IIM, Ahmedabad. His current research interests focus on public policy & regulation. His recent work has focused on competition policy, inter-organizational linkages for technology development (especially academia-industry relationships), strategic and policy aspects of intellectual property rights, linkages between public policy and technological change, industrial clusters, economics of strategy and the small scale sector in India. His Sectoral focus of research has been on Pharmaceutical, IT, Electronics and Auto-component industries.

He has been a recipient of the of the Ford Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Economics and has spent two years at the Economic Growth Center, Yale University, USA as a Visiting Research Fellow. He has also worked as an advisor and consultant to several international organizations: the World Bank, Intermediate Technology Development Group, U.K. and the United Nations University Institute of New Technologies, Maastricht, The Netherlands.

Jason Scott
Co-Managing Partner, Encourage Capital

Jason Scott is a Co-Managing Partner and on the Board of Directors of Encourage Capital. He was a co-founder of EKO. Jason is a member of the Investment Committee of the EKO Green Carbon Fund. Prior to EKO, Jason was a founding Director and investment analyst at Generation Investment Management, co-founded by David Blood and former Vice President Al Gore, Jr. As its first employee, Jason helped build the firm and its first and second products, investing in global listed equities and climate change solutions respectively. From 1999 to 2004, Jason worked with Acumen Fund, Flatiron Future Fund/Foundation and New Philanthropy Capital. From 1996-1999, Jason was President of a NYC-based software company. Previously, Jason helped found and build Public Allies, a youth and community development organization.

In 1998, the Rockefeller Foundation selected Jason as a fellow in its Next Generation Leadership Program. He co-founded Cleantech for Obama and served on several transition advisory boards for the Obama Administration and is currently on the boards of Oil Change International and Public Allies. Jason also co-founded and jointly leads a network of family offices investing in Cleantech, Renewables and other Environmental Opportunities (the CREO Network). Jason graduated from Duke University and has an MBA jointly from Columbia and London Business Schools.

Vishal Goyal
Country Manager, FICO

Vishal Goyal is an accomplished, results-oriented executive with demonstrated success in the analytics and financial services industry. He has created and driven profitable business lines from scratch, that have gone on to become mainstream; thus creating shareholder value. He is a multi-disciplinarian who brings strategy development and execution, business and product development, as well as innovation.

Presently he serves as the Country Manager for FICO India. In the past he has co-founded Innovation Prepaid & Payment Solutions (IPSS) and has also been a senior executive at MasterCard Worldwide. Vishal brings a deep understanding of analytics, solution development and process engineering to execute complex projects. He frequently shares his experiences at industry forums.

He graduated from the Delhi College of Engineering  and then pursued his MBA from the University of Arizona as well as acquired a Masters in International Management from the Thunderbird School of Global Management.