Jamil
Khatri

In 1994, KPMG was arriving in India. Accounting advisory as a discipline barely existed. Jamil Khatri joined as a trainee - and spent the next three decades turning a nascent profession into one of the most consequential forces in Indian corporate finance.

He made partner at approximately 28 years old. In a world where Big 4 partnership tracks typically stretch into a decade-long waiting game, that landing is rare enough to define a career. For Khatri, it was just the beginning of a longer run.

By 2012, he was running KPMG's global Accounting Advisory Services practice from India - a unit of 4,000+ consultants generating over $1 billion in annual revenue. The first Big 4 professional globally to head a global business unit out of India. He became the architect of how Indian conglomerates - Wipro, L&T, ICICI Bank, Dr. Reddy's, Godrej Group, Tech Mahindra - navigated US listings, SEC filings, and international accounting standards.

He holds dual accounting qualifications that span the world's two largest capital markets: Indian Chartered Accountant and US Certified Public Accountant. In the corridors of finance, that combination is the equivalent of holding two passports to the most exclusive rooms in the profession.

Then in 2022, after 27 years, Khatri did something that most career executives never do - he chose uncertainty over tenure. He left KPMG and, with longtime colleague Sandip Khetan, started Uniqus Consultech. No clients. No brand recognition. Just the conviction that the consulting industry was ripe for a technology-led reinvention.

The thesis was straightforward but radical in execution: combine deep domain expertise in accounting, ESG, governance, and finance with proprietary AI platforms to deliver outcomes at a speed and price point the Big 4 couldn't match. Three years later, the market seems to be agreeing.

Uniqus now operates 11 offices across the US, India, and the Middle East. It counts HDFC Bank, Reliance Industries, Flipkart, Grammarly, Zomato, and GE among its clients - a list that spans Mumbai's financial district and Silicon Valley's startup economy in the same breath. In April 2025, the firm raised a $20 million Series C, pushing its valuation to $250 million. Khatri's target: $500 million in revenue before pursuing an IPO.

What he's building isn't a boutique consulting shop staffed by ex-Big 4 refugees. It's a platform company that happens to deliver consulting services - with GenAI tooling baked into every workflow, a proprietary suite of automation products, and a talent model built to access global expertise without the geographic constraints of a traditional firm.

Khatri is measured when discussing the IPO. "The IPO is something we'd like to do, but only after we reach our next level of scale." That next level means $500 million in revenue. It means margins that prove the tech-enabled model works at scale. It means showing that a consulting firm built in India can go public on its own terms.

The addressable market he's targeting - tech-enabled global consulting - is pegged at over $100 billion. Uniqus at $500 million revenue would be a rounding error in that market, which is precisely why Khatri is bullish on the runway ahead.

The Middle East expansion is a newer chapter in the story. The ESG regulatory push across the GCC, combined with an accounting modernization wave driven by Saudi Vision 2030, is creating demand for precisely the services Uniqus has been refining in India and the US. Al Rajhi Group and Tawal on the client list signal that the model travels.

Away from the firm, Khatri is a mentor to early-stage startups and an early-stage investor himself - a posture that keeps him close to how new technology companies think about financial infrastructure. It's also, probably, not a coincidence that the person who championed a founder's mindset inside KPMG for 27 years eventually had to become a founder himself.