Mr. Shankar Narayanan, formerly the Managing Director & Co-Head of Carlyle Asia Growth Partners, is founder of Sanaka Group.

Mr. Narayanan was associated with Carlyle for over last 13 years and has been in private equity since 1993. Mr. Narayanan has unique distinction of having run some of the investee companies as a CEO with a very practical perspective of growth and challenges across industries.

While in Carlyle, he has led and advised investments such as Claris Lifesciences, Elitecore Technologies, Repco Home Finance, Tirumala Milk Products, Edelweiss Financial Services, South Indian Bank, Cyient. He has also successfully delivered exits from some of these investments.

Prior to joining Carlyle in 2004, among others he was with Deutsche Bank Capital Partners, based in Hong Kong, as a Director covering South Asia and India. Prior to Deutsche Bank, Mr. Narayanan was Managing Director and CEO of Hathway Investments in India. In his private equity career, he was involved in a number of prominent private equity investments such as Johnson Tiles, Exide Industries, Prism Cement, Hathway Cable, Asianet Satellite Communications, Pushpa Polymers, Tata Infomedia and AFL Limited and served on the Board of Directors of all these Companies.

Over his career, Mr. Narayanan has served on the board of various investee companies across multiple sectors such as - Repco Home Finance (Financial Services), Claris Lifesciences (Healthcare & Pharma), Elitecore (Technology), Tirumala Milk Products (Consumer), FSS (FinTech), Cyient (Technology), QuEST Global (Technology), Exide Industries (Manufacturing), Hathway Cable (Media and Broadband), Prism Cement (Manufacturing), Financial Software & Systems (FinTech).

In the past, Mr. Narayanan has spotted winners and been involved with investments in mid-market companies that have eventually gone on to become multi-billion dollar businesses, such as QuEST Global, Exide Industries, Hathway Cable, Prism Cement, Financial Software & Systems and in the process delivered multi bagger returns for investors.

Mr. Narayanan is very well networked and has built deep relationships with intermediaries which can be leveraged to benefit from substantial inbound deal flow. In addition, he is also extensively connected to entrepreneurs themselves giving him the ability to proactively approach potential target companies to create proprietary deals.

Mr. Narayanan started his career with Citibank in Mumbai. He is MBA from XLRI having distinction of being Gold Medalist & standing first in the area of Finance, and B.Tech from IIT Delhi. He is currently on the Boards of Sanaka Capital HK Advisors, Sanaka Capital Investment Managers, Sanaka Capital Growth Fund, Sanaka India Advisors and Visionary RCM Infotech (India) and Coding Solution Topco Inc. (USA).