In episode 38 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Sandeep Farias, Founder & Managing Partner at Elevar Equity, on democratizing access to essential products and services for over 40 million low income households and catalyzing billions of dollars of capital in 41 companies.
Sandeep Farias is Founder & Managing Partner at Elevar Equity. He leads Elevar globally and is responsible for the firm’s strategy and organizational development, while engaging with entrepreneurs in India and Latin America to think through inflection points in their entrepreneurial journeys.
Working with Elevar teams in India, United States and Mexico, he plays a key role across markets in determining the firm’s investment priorities, underwriting of new investment opportunities and portfolio management in India and Latin America, and fundraising.
Sandeep has close to 25 years of work experience in diverse areas such as emerging markets investing, governance and regulation, organizational design, transactions and structuring, and corporate law.
He founded Elevar in 2008, being passionately driven by working with early stage companies that foster economic development for low income communities; particularly in financial services including MSME finance and microfinance (where he played a leadership role in the sector’s transformation over a decade from the non-profit space to formal banking), affordable education, healthcare and agricultural services.
Sandeep started his career in 1996 after completing an integrated law and arts degree from the National Law School of India University (NLS). Over the next eight years, he worked mostly on cross border transactions at two leading corporate law firms, Amarchand Mangaldas and Nishith Desai Associates (NDA), worked in house on Wipro’s NYSE listing, and taught at NLS. At NDA he led the corporate law team and founded the firm’s award winning social and development sector practice.
Prior to founding Elevar, in 2004 he established Unitus in India and actively partnered with some of India’s leading microfinance institutions / banks, which were then in their formative years.
About Elevar Equity
Elevar Equity fuels the economic resilience and vibrancy of underserved customers and low-income communities by investing early growth capital in entrepreneurs building at the intersection of inclusivity, affordability, and massive scale.
Led by an entrepreneurial emerging markets team passionate about addressing issues of access and inequity, Elevar invests in businesses that demonstrate a direct correlation between high impact and returns.
So far in its 15-year journey, the Elevar Method of investing has democratized essential products and services for over 40 million households and catalyzed billions of dollars of capital into 40+ companies across India and Latin America.
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