Srikanth Velamakanni and the decisions that took 26 years

The money was there. The founders had barely begun. In 2000, Srikanth Velamakanni and his colleagues received an investment offer from HCL co-founders Subhash Arora and Arjun Malhotra: $750,000, with a $3 million valuation. For a young company, it was a promising opening. There was one awkward condition. The investors wanted control of the board.

Velamakanni was chosen to decline it. The team gathered around a speakerphone; their prospective backers were in Singapore. After he explained the decision, the line went silent. The deal died. Then the dot-com market collapsed, and the easy confidence that another offer would come became considerably more expensive to maintain.

A quarter of a century later, he retold the episode with an instruction to himself: “Never let ego drive decisions.” It is a striking entry in the biography of someone whose business is helping other people decide. Fractal would eventually reach the stock market in February 2026. The distance between that speakerphone and the listing is where much of his story lives.

The course he thought he would never need

Entrepreneurship had not been his intended destination. He grew up in a small town in Assam, where his father worked for an oil company. He expected to work for other people. A middle-class household did not appear to supply the capital for an alternative.

There was also a moral objection. His father believed honest business was a contradiction. When Velamakanni arrived at IIM Ahmedabad in 1996, he carried that assumption with him. In a business ethics course taught by Deepti Bhatnagar, a visiting Narayana Murthy described building Infosys around intellect and values. Here was evidence that the family theory might need revision.

Venture funding challenged the other assumption: a founder might raise money rather than inherit it. Neither change instantly produced a business plan. Together, they made starting something conceivable. The electrical engineering graduate from IIT Delhi completed his management studies in 1998, worked at ANZ and ICICI, and co-founded Fractal in 2000. A career he had ruled out had become his occupation.

First, persuade a bank that the maths matters

His banking apprenticeship involved structured debt and collateralized bond obligations. At ICICI, he was part of the team that launched India's first collateralized bond obligation. He had experience of numbers carrying real consequences, rather than sitting politely in a spreadsheet.

Fractal's early work brought that experience into lending and marketing. Its engagements with ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Citibank and IDBI included scorecards, cross-selling and customer retention. These were concrete commercial questions: who might borrow, who might leave, and which offer might be useful to which customer?

There was a market to educate before there was an industry to join. By 2014, Velamakanni was describing a particular obstacle in India: companies could consume analysis without having the people and processes to use it in everyday decisions. Fractal had shifted much of its attention abroad. The mathematical work could travel; persuading an organization to act on it remained local, patient work.

That distinction helps explain his continuing interest in human behavior. A prediction can be accurate while the organization around it remains stubbornly unchanged. Anyone who has watched a meeting survive overwhelming evidence will recognize the problem. The spreadsheet has finished; the meeting has another forty minutes.

The founders needed a decision, too

The early partnership shared authority among friends. As the business expanded, that arrangement became difficult. Different founders worked in different regions, each with claims on resources. The company selling better decisions was finding its own decisions harder to make.

A move to appoint a chief executive brought the tensions into the open. Velamakanni became CEO; two founders subsequently left. Years later, he described anger, reflection and an eventual apology. The episode resists the tidy treatment that business biographies sometimes give disagreements. There were relationships at stake as well as an organization chart.

His retrospective account is more revealing than a tale of effortless resolve would have been. He acknowledged his own part in what went wrong. Fractal continued, but continuing required learning how to lead people who had originally joined as equals. There is no algebraic shortcut through a bruised friendship.

“Well, I’ve always wanted to have a mentor.”

Srikanth Velamakanni, reflecting on learning to be a CEO

In an early profile, he admitted wanting someone to help him with the job. He also worried whether being seen at the movies in a T-shirt and jeans was appropriate CEO attire. The uncertainty is rather endearing. Before the long title and the industry appointments, there was someone trying to work out whether a chief executive was allowed a Saturday.

When being clever stopped being enough

Another correction came from a friend who challenged Fractal's attitude toward clients. The company, the friend argued, cared deeply about analytics but too readily blamed customers when work failed to produce results. Technical pride was getting in the way of service.

Velamakanni took time to absorb the criticism, then brought it to his executive team. Fractal chose to concentrate on existing clients for a year instead of pursuing new ones. It also became more willing to cooperate with other firms working for the same customer, including businesses it might otherwise regard as competitors.

That is a less photogenic kind of entrepreneurial change than a product launch. It asks people to surrender the satisfaction of being right about someone else's shortcomings. It also alters what counts as a successful assignment. The quality of the analysis has to survive contact with the customer's organization.

The distinction still runs through Fractal's work. Velamakanni's responsibility now includes strengthening client partnerships and helping the business grow. The job has become larger; the uncomfortable question from his friend remains perfectly portable: did the customer actually succeed?

A business with a longer calendar

In January 2022, TPG announced a $360 million investment in Fractal, combining new investment with a purchase of shares from funds advised by Apax. The announcement described a company with more than 3,500 employees across 16 locations. A business founded in 2000 had spent over two decades getting to its unicorn moment.

Velamakanni has repeatedly discussed building an institution that lasts a century. That aspiration makes the funding round a piece of the story rather than its natural ending. Money allows research, hiring and experiments; the harder question is whether the organization can keep finding useful work after today's fashionable terminology has worn out.

He has also described analytics and AI as a continuum. In his account, the business questions persist while the available methods change. Fractal began investing in AI products as deep learning gained ground, and he has emphasized recruiting people who want to learn. A company built around a fixed collection of skills would have an awkward time with that calendar.

His interest in the machinery goes back to college. He remembers electrical engineering students learning neural networks while computer science students took AI as a separate subject, associated with rules. The examples included fingerprint recognition and signature verification. Later, he followed the discussion around the fiftieth anniversary of the Dartmouth AI conference, fascinated that researchers were still debating which approach would carry the field forward. It is a useful detail about his education: the categories that now seem settled once looked quite different, even to the students learning them.

The teacher sets a practical assignment

At Plaksha University in Punjab, Velamakanni is a founder and trustee. He also teaches. His course, “Machine Learning to Make Better Decisions,” puts the same preoccupation on the timetable that he takes into client conversations.

He explains the commitment through gratitude to teachers and their ability to multiply the effect of their work. Education and entrepreneurship, in his view, complement one another: people learn to understand problems, then some take the risk of building solutions. Contributing money is one form of participation. Preparing a class and teaching it require another kind of attention.

In July 2026, his advice to young professionals was practical. Build something, even a small application. Learn the mathematics if you want to develop models. Be able to break a problem into parts and explain your reasoning. The degree is a beginning; a working piece of software supplies a sterner examiner.

His hiring shorthand is “humble, hungry, smart.” Humility means recognizing what you do not know and being willing to revise it. There is a family resemblance between that expectation and his account of changing his own mind about entrepreneurship. A useful education must leave room for its owner to be wrong.

India comes back into the picture

The year 2026 widened his responsibilities. Fractal's shares began trading on February 16. On April 23, Nasscom appointed him chairperson, succeeding Sindhu Gangadharan. He had previously served as vice chairperson and spent more than six years on its executive council.

The industry agenda includes transforming technology services with AI, encouraging products and agentic systems, and developing India's own capabilities. Working with Nasscom president Rajesh Nambiar and the executive council means representing businesses with different interests, resources and anxieties. It is another setting in which a good argument must become a decision shared by other people.

In August, Fractal announced a dedicated India Business Unit, led by Rishi Seth within its APAC practice. Velamakanni pointed to greater interest from Indian enterprises in moving beyond AI pilots. The company that had once found the domestic market difficult to serve was committing a team to its changing demands.

There is a pleasing circularity here, without any guarantee of an easy ending. The former banker is still asking what organizations will do with their information. The founder who declined a cheque is still weighing how to build for the long term. And the student who once dismissed entrepreneurship now teaches a course about making decisions. Twenty-six years on, he has plenty of material for the class.