NextGen Leaders: Five Indian Americans Among Business Insider’s ‘Rising Stars of Wall Street’
- The list includes young investors, traders, and dealmakers who are on the runway to success even as banks and money managers brace for cutbacks.
Five Indian Americans are among Business Insiders ‘Rising Stars of Wall Street,’ a list of investors, traders, and dealmakers under 35. Indian American investors, traders, and dealmakers in the list include Swati Rao, Akash Pradhan, Naveen Shahani, Richesh Shah and Vinay Trivedi. The young professionals selected are “on the runway to success even as banks and money managers brace for cutbacks,” the publication says. They include those investing in space ventures, and multibillion-dollar trades, as well as “some up-and-comers” who are “pushing their teams to the top of industry rankings” and “immigrants climbing the ranks at major institutions infusing diverse ideas into their decision-making.”
Swati Rao, 34, 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, 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 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. The Wharton graduate helped found and spearhead Apollo’s special-purpose acquisition company or SPAC in 2021. A native of Long Island and the son of two entrepreneurs, Shahani, 32, told Insider he was drawn to private equity in part through the inspiration of seeing his father run multiple businesses, starting with a retail store in Manhattan in the 1980s. Before working at Apollo, he worked in the financial-sponsors group of Credit Suisse.
As a director at PJT Partners, Richesh Shah “doesn’t preach the value of toiling late into the night unnecessarily,” Insider says. The 33-year-old 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.
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.”