Jyotsna Krishnan

Jyotsna Krishnan is Managing Partner at Elevar Equity, where she leads the firm's investing strategy and priorities in India and helps drive overall fund performance globally. She joined Elevar in 2011, drawn by what she describes as her admiration for the entrepreneurial spirit of underserved communities. At Elevar she has partnered closely with founders building transformational business models across agriculture, MSME services, affordable education, and quality healthcare. She is also a founding team member and now Co-Founder & CEO of EPIC World, an initiative (including a data platform, "EPIC Intelligence") aimed at mapping and serving the roughly $10 trillion informal economy of India's "Entrepreneurial Households."

Before Elevar, Jyotsna spent close to eight years at HSBC across multiple roles in retail banking and wealth management in India. She began in sales and customer relationship management, went on to lead a vertical within the learning and development function, and later managed business intelligence, finance, and distribution strategy for retail banking, working directly with the bank's India leadership. In total she brings roughly two decades of experience spanning banking, retail financial services, strategy, business finance, sales and operations, business intelligence, and training and development.

She is a Commerce graduate from Shri Ram College of Commerce, Delhi University, holds an MBA from the S.P. Jain Institute of Management & Research, Mumbai, and is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA®).

• Invests early-growth equity (Seed/Series A, typically ~$1M–$2.5M checks) in companies serving financially unserved and underserved customers in India and Latin America.
• Built around the "Elevar Method," which targets businesses at the intersection of inclusivity, affordability, and massive scale — Elevar reports having reached 45–60 million+ low-income households and catalyzed billions in follow-on capital across 40–50+ companies.
• Core themes: financial inclusion, agriculture, education, healthcare, housing, and MSME business services / marketplaces.
• In her own words: *"An enormous amount of opportunity resides in communities that do not have access to the formal ecosystem. The very idea of being able to partner with these communities, with their wealth of experience, innovative mindset and resilience, through efficient business models is inspiring."*
• Her broader thesis (via EPIC World): India's true economic strength lies beyond the wealthiest ~10% — in the ~247 million middle-income "Entrepreneurial Households" she argues are invisible to traditional VC metrics, representing ~$10 trillion in transactional activity projected to grow roughly 10x over the next decade.
• Emphasizes deep understanding of underserved customer insights and building operational systems that scale impact, rather than chasing metro-centric "unicorns."