Nagaraja Prakasam

Nagaraja Prakasam is a partner at Acumen, a New York-based, $100-million impact venture fund. He has served as an independent director in Guardian-a portfolio company of Acumen that works on microfinance in water and sanitation.

He is the co-founder and chairman of the Nativelead Foundation, which enables entrepreneurship in the non-metros of Tamil Nadu. This model has been replicated in the Malabar area of Kerala as MiZone/Malabar Angels. He is sought out by government and educational institutions and serves them in different capacities: an adviser; resident mentor at the N.S. Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore; member of the Investment Committee, Indian Institute of Technology Madras Incubator; and mentor at the Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. He has been featured in Forbes magazine as an investor engineering social change.

Nagaraja has spearheaded impact thinking in the Indian Angel Network (IAN) and co-founded IAN Impact.