Jai Shekhar. Investment professional. Backing technology founders working on scalable problems across the physical and digital fronts of the global south.

I grew up in a defence family that moved every few years, across four states in India, and I have lived in two countries since. It makes you good at walking into a room where nobody knows you.

Technology is the part of a civilisation you can watch happen. Why some societies take a new tool and others leave it on the shelf is the question I keep reading about, mostly in history and economics, which is a strange thing to admit on a work website.

My training is chemical engineering and it stuck. I still want to know what a process costs in energy, what a material will take before it fails, and what a reaction will refuse to do. Most decks reach the market size before any of that is settled.

Since 2020 I have founded a rural last-mile logistics company, consulted on public health systems in Bihar, modelled hydrogen and emissions in Washington, and finished a degree in energy science, technology and policy at Carnegie Mellon in December 2023. None of it was planned as a route into venture.

Some of it ended up in print. I was the lead author of a CEEW report on how far India can rely on its wind, the youngest in the think tank's fifteen-year history, the lead author of a paper in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews on how COVID-19 shook India's renewable power, and a co-author of a Belfer Center paper on centre-state relations in India's climate and energy policy.

I read a lot of economics for someone trained in chemistry, and that is where the second lens comes from: how a business behaves once it is listed, and what the market has already decided about it. In a diligence call I am usually the one asking what the science actually allows.

Away from work I watch a great deal of football and support Chelsea. I look for good cafes and restaurants wherever I am, and I spend a lot of time with my dog, Oreo. He is unimpressed by all of the above.