RENUKA RAMNATH

Ramnath has spent more than 35 years in Indian finance. She came up through ICICI, the giant Indian financial group, working across investment banking and structured finance before landing in private equity.

As managing director and CEO of ICICI Venture, she scaled the platform from a roughly $100 million proprietary fund into a $2 billion private equity business that raised money from outside investors. That made it one of the largest PE funds in India.

In 2009 she left to found Multiples Alternate Asset Management, her own independent firm. She has run it ever since, building it into a billion-dollar India-focused fund.

Her career splits into two acts. Act one was ICICI Venture, where she turned a captive in-house fund into a $2 billion player and helped invent the modern Indian private equity playbook.

Act two is Multiples, the firm she founded in 2009. Multiples backs mid-size Indian companies, writing checks that have historically run from about $15 million to $50 million.

The idea is to buy meaningful stakes in growing businesses and help them get bigger over years, not months. She is the founder, managing director, and CEO, which is rare for a woman in this part of finance.

Private equity is a different animal from venture. Ramnath is not spraying small checks hoping for one rocket ship.

She takes large stakes in fewer companies and works closely with the people running them. Her whole philosophy is built around the entrepreneur.

She says the three parts of building a PE firm are knowing the entrepreneur, working with them in a spirit of trust, and nurturing their dream. She wants her money to come with deep understanding of the human behind the business, not just a wire transfer and a board seat.

She is patient by design and openly says there is no quick win worth compromising the long game for.

The biggest win is the build itself. Taking ICICI Venture from around $100 million to $2 billion in roughly eight years is the kind of result that makes a career.

It turned a sleepy in-house fund into one of the most important investors in the country and proved that Indian private equity could raise real outside capital. Most people would have stopped there and enjoyed the title.

The fact that she then risked her reputation to start Multiples from zero, and built that to a billion dollars too, is the proof it was skill and not just a good seat.

Leaving a powerful, secure perch at ICICI Venture to start a brand-new firm in 2009 looked reckless to a lot of people. The timing was brutal.

The world had just been through the 2008 financial crisis, and raising a first-time fund into that wreckage was about the hardest version of the job. Plenty of new funds died in that environment.

The risk was that she would trade a legendary run for a failed startup with her name on it. She has been candid that building Multiples meant living with ambiguity and uncertainty for years before it paid off.

Ramnath believes capital is only as good as the understanding that comes with it. Money helps, but money that arrives with real sensitivity to the founder and the dream behind the business is worth far more.

She builds for the long term and refuses to compromise that for fast results. She also believes she is, at heart, an entrepreneur rather than a financier.

After working closely with more than 100 entrepreneurs, she realised she shared their instinct to dream and build, which is why she ended up creating her own firm instead of just funding other people's.

Ramnath grew up and was educated entirely in India, in Mumbai, before becoming one of the most powerful figures in Indian finance. She is open about how unusual her path is in an industry where the top tables are almost entirely men.

Rather than treat that as a personal trophy, she has spent years trying to widen the door. She has said she would be happiest if there were a hundred or a thousand more women like her in the field, a whole tribe instead of a lonely few at the top.

Ramnath earned a bachelor's degree in engineering from VJTI at the University of Mumbai. She followed it with an MBA, also from the University of Mumbai.

Later she completed the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School. The engineering-plus-management combination is a common one among Indian finance leaders, but few used it to build two billion-dollar funds.

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