PR Ganapathy is Regional Director (India) at Stanford Seed, an initiative of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business to help entrepreneurs in developing countries. As Regional Director, Ganapathy has operational responsibility for implementing the Seed program in India, and directly works with 60+ entrepreneurs each year, spending significant amounts of time helping them overcome their challenges and scale.
Prior to Stanford Seed, Ganapathy spent seven years at Villgro Innovations Foundation, holding the position of President (India) at the time of his departure. During his time, he helped Villgro significantly grow its operations, add and refine programs, attract senior management talent and add new donors. He was also the co-founder of the Menterra Social Impact Fund, an early-stage, small-ticket investment fund that invests in social entrepreneurs in the health, agriculture and education sectors. Ganapathy also co-founded Haqdarshak, a social enterprise that uses mobile technology and a network of trained field level operatives to help needy citizens discover, apply for and benefit from government and private schemes such as pensions, scholarships grants and subsidies.
He is actively involved in building the social enterprise ecosystem as a member of Executive Committee of ANDE and other committees. Ganapathy is a regular guest speaker at many events on social entrepreneurship and he designed and taught a course on social entrepreneurship at the Indian School of Development Management.
Prior to Villgro, Ganapathy was the Managing Director and Chief Executive of DSNL Ltd., a pioneer in the teleconferencing / enterprise collaboration space. Before DSNL, Ganapathy lived in the United States for 11 years. While in the US, he co-founded Gridstone Research in August 2005, and served as the Chief Executive Officer until 2010. Before founding Gridstone, Ganapathy spent 7 years at Infosys Technologies and its Business Process Outsourcing subsidiary, Infosys BPO, in Investor Relations, Finance & Administration and Business Development roles. As Infosys’ Investor Relations Officer, Ganapathy was a member of the company’s pioneering, award-winning NASDAQ-listing team. Prior to Infosys, Ganapathy was a member of the Tata Administrative Service, a cadre of select managers for the Tata Group, India’s largest business conglomerate.
Ganapathy has an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad, and an Honors degree in Mathematics from Hindu College. He lives in Chennai, India.
