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Leading online business publication ‘Business Insider’ has named five Indian Americans in its annual ‘Rising Stars of Wall Street’, a list of investors, traders, and dealmakers under 35.
Swati Rao, Akash Pradhan, Naveen Shahani, Richesh Shah and Vinay Trivedi are five of the 25 people in the list . According to Insider, the young professionals are “on the runway to success even as banks and money managers brace for cutbacks.”
Insider said, “One invests in space ventures, another executes multibillion-dollar trades. Some up-and-comers are pushing their teams to the top of industry rankings, and many are immigrants climbing the ranks at major institutions infusing diverse ideas into their decision-making.”
Here are the five Indian Americans:
Swati Rao, 34, CITI
Rao is a director within the banking, capital markets, and advisory division at Citi, focusing on deals mainly for companies handling transportation, logistics, and the supply chain. In just the past year, she has been involved in trades and transactions worth more than $8 billion in total value, spanning tech, logistics, and transportation.
Rao, who relocated from India to the U.S. about a decade ago, studied engineering but came to finance via an internship at Citi in 2012. She’s gone on to work with clients including FedEx, UPS, Google, and other big names throughout her career in banking.
Akash Pradhan, 33, TPG
Pradhan is a principal at TPG. The UC Berkeley graduate joined the boutique-investment bank in 2011 “despite not knowing much about what the firm did,” he told Insider. Before that, he worked at The Raine Group where he focused on sports, media, and entertainment. He left Raine for TPG in 2013 and has been with the $127 billion private-equity firm ever since, aside from a stint at Harvard Business School to get his MBA. Promoted to the role of a principal in January 2022, Pradhan helps lead investments in software and enterprise technology, working across funds including TPG Capital, TPG Growth, and the impact-oriented sector of TPG, The Rise Fund. Over the past five years, Pradhan has been involved in or helped lead deals that total roughly $3 billion in invested capital.
Naveen Shahani, 32, Apollo Global Management
Shahani has spent the past eight-and-a-half years at Apollo Global Management and is currently a principal, working within the firm’s private-equity division to scout out and execute investments ranging from distressed opportunities to straightforward buyouts. He helped found and spearhead Apollo’s special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, business that raised two inaugural SPACs in 2021, had a key role in the distressed-for-control investment of the airport-baggage handler Swissport, which came about during the COVID pandemic. The investor has racked up an expansive range of deal experience, having helped facilitate four buyouts, three restructurings, and two exits. Notably, Shahani worked on the buyout of the restaurant chain Qdoba, the exit of Sprouts Farmers Market, and the restructuring of the family-entertainment center Chuck E. Cheese
Richesh Shah, 33, PJT Partners
As a director at PJT Partners, Richesh Shah “doesn’t preach the value of toiling late into the night unnecessarily,” Insider said. At PJT, Shah is part of the boutique bank’s structured-products team, which develops bespoke financing and capital solutions for big investors. They’ve worked on a variety of projects for clients such as Blackstone, Yum! Brands, and Madison Square Garden. Previously, Shah was an investment-banking analyst covering financial institutions and media-and-telecoms companies at Citi. He was part of the original team that spun out of Blackstone’s M&A group in 2015, forming PJT Partners.
Vinay Trivedi, 31, General Atlantic
During his time at Harvard studying computer science, Vinay Trivedi spent most of his free time building apps and “pretending I was the next Mark Zuckerberg,” he told Insider. This passion for technology is what ultimately led him to the investment industry. The 31-year-old is now a vice president at General Atlantic focusing on the sector. Since joining General Atlantic in 2019, he has been involved in several deals totaling $3.3 billion in invested capital. He was also involved in General Atlantic’s deal-making with the biometric-security firm Clear Secure, from its initial 2019 investment to Clear’s June 2021 IPO. He previously worked at Blackstone and SoftBank. Trivedi is on the advisory council for the think tank Center for Democracy and Technology, and noted that his interest in innovative technologies also extends to the impact they have on society, “whether that’s diversity issues, AI and job loss, or privacy.”
Five Indian Americans in Business Insider’s ‘Rising Stars of Wall Street’ list of 25
