Vikram Akula Email & Phone Number

Celebrated social entrepreneur Vikram Akula has received multiple honors in recognition of his work to end poverty in India via microfinance. Named among TIME magazine's 100 Most Influential People of the Year in 2006, Vikram Akula also holds the titles of Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year (Business Transformation) in India and Social Entrepreneur of the Year in India, and in 2008, the World Economic Forum recognized him as a Young Global Leader.After establishing SKS Microfinance in 1997, he played the lead role in growing the company for more than a decade. SKS Microfinance provides micro-loans to women in underserved areas of India where they are taught financial literacy basics. The women then establish and grow small businesses. In 2006, Vikram Akula transformed SKS into a for-profit organization and pursued a commercial model to attract more capital, which was required to scale. Premier venture capital funds around the world including Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital started investing, and SKS completed an IPO in 2010, which was oversubscribed 14 times. When he left the company in 2011, SKS Microfinance had more than 7.3 million borrowers and had disbursed more than $5 billion in loans.Born in Hyderabad, India, Vikram Akula grew up in the United States and studied at Tufts University, Yale University, and the University of Chicago. In 1994, Vikram Akula returned to India as a Fulbright Scholar. For a year, he headed a government-funded program that offered microcredit to poor farmers to provide them with food security. The research he conducted in this position significantly influenced the launch of SKS Microfinance only a few years later. Vikram Akula is the author of A Fistful of Rice: My Unexpected Quest to End Poverty Through Profitability, published by Harvard Business Review Press. This book analyzes his experiences with microfinance through SKS Microfinance and its potential for alleviating poverty around the world.

Listed skills include Finance, International Relations, Business Strategy, and Business Analysis.

• Chairperson

  Sks Microfinance

  Vikram Akula is the Founder and Chairperson Emeritus of SKS Microfinance Ltd., which provides financial services to over 5 million poor women for the purpose of enabling them to earn income and improve economic well-being. For his pioneering work to create a market-based model of microfinance, Akula was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world (2006) and was nominated by Forbes for the “India Person in the Year 2009.”