
Gautam Ivatury has served as one of our directors, our Chairman and our Chief Executive Officer since incorporation. Mr. Ivatury has been a co-founder and managing partner of ALMA Sustainable Finance, a debt investment firm active in the global inclusive finance and carbon finance sectors, since May 2020, and has been a senior advisor and investment committee member for Encourage Capital, a New York-based private equity firm that invests in specialty finance lenders in India among other sectors, since October 2016. Mr. Ivatury has held founding or CXO roles at ventures such as India’s first microfinance institution to IPO (SKS Microfinance), Kenya’s first mobile-based credit provider (Jipange Kusave), India’s digital micro-lender (Happy Loans), and the firm that incubated M-KOPA, Africa’s pay-go solar financier. Earlier, as a member of the management team at the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), a multi-donor trust fund hosted by the World Bank, Mr. Ivatury helped secure one of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s largest grants in financial inclusion and set up an industry-shaping digital finance program. He has also chaired the GSM Association’s Mobile Money for the Unbanked Fund, consulted to Fortune 500 companies including Microsoft and Visa, and developed digital finance projects in nine countries. Mr. Ivatury previously held roles at the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. Mr. Ivatury’s writings on the impact, business design and regulation of technology-driven financial inclusion have been published by the World Bank, CGAP, MIT Press, Springer Verlag, and media including the Banker and Revue Banque. Mr. Ivatury is a graduate of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University, and holds a Master’s degree and Bachelor’s degree in international economics and internal studies, respectively. We believe Mr. Ivatury is qualified to serve on our board due to his extensive experience in financial industry and management skills.