Social Venture Angel Investors/Incubators @ XLRI, Nov 15-16

My course on Introduction to Social Entrepreneurship is coming to an end in a week on Nov 16th, when the groups will be presenting their social venture plans.

I have invited Sonali Singh, Director, Start up!, and Vijay Shukla, Co-Founder, Setu Ventures to assess and give feedback on their plans. The previous day - Nov 15th - they will also be interacting with class to share what the angel investors look for in a plan.

Sonali Singh is Director with Start up! - a venture which aims to demystify the business of "getting started", and partners with social entrepreneurs to incubate innovations, sculpt models, forge connections and raise resources to enable launch of new ideas and ventures.



Based out of bangalore, Sonali has worked for 10 years with corporate and civil society sectors of India. She did her post-graduation at National Institute of Fashion Technology, and worked with garment industry in production management. She then went to pursue her second post-graduation in Personnel Management and Industrial Relations from XLRI Jamshedpur, and began her career in human resouces (HR) at Citibank. She later joined Accenture where she worked for over five years in various roles. In her last role, apart from leading the HR function for more than 1,200 employees in India, she was also India lead for Policy and Employee Relations.

In early 2008, Sonali decided to switch careers and undertook a couple of short-term projects with CSOs before joining Comat, a Bangalore-based social enterprise for a short time. In April 2009, she joined Start Up! as full-time director.

Vijay Shukla is the Co-Founder of Setu Ventures, a firm that provides professional and financial assistance to early stage companies and entrepreneurs, and has over 15 years of industry experience (with Steel Authority of India, E&Y and GlaxoSmithKline), and specializes in the areas of strategy, business development, consulting and engineering, and is interested in the areas of value creation, technology, entrepreneurship and education. He is a ‘parallel entrepreneur’ and has earlier co-founded Eduvisors, India’s largest education sector focused business consulting and research services company, and ValueFirst, India’s leading enterprise mobile data services company.



An engineering graduate from IT-BHU and MBA from XLRI, he has mastered the ‘art’ of evaluating business strategies and organizational processes through his career with working in the domains of public sector, entrepreneurship, information and mobile technology, FMCG and management consulting services.