Ashish Dhawan

Ashish Dhawan (born March 10, 1969) is an Indian philanthropist and former private equity investor who co-founded and ran one of India's leading private equity funds, Chrysalis Capital (ChrysCapital). He is the founder-CEO of the Convergence Foundation, founder-chairperson of the Central Square Foundation, and a founder-trustee of Ashoka University.

Dhawan has served on the board of trustees of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation since 2022. His net worth is approximately $800 million.

Education
Dhawan attended St. Xavier's Collegiate School, followed by St. James' School in Kolkata. He is a graduate of Yale University, where he earned a bachelor of science degree in applied mathematics and economics, and Harvard Business School, where he earned an MBA.

Career
From 1992 to 1993, Dhawan worked on Wall Street at boutique investment bank Wasserstein Perella & Co., where he was the only Indian analyst. He then moved to McCown DeLeeuw & Co., an eight-person private equity firm in California, where he was the junior-most associate.

After completing his MBA in 1997, Dhawan went to work at Goldman Sachs, where he was part of the Risk Arbitrage Group. At the age of 29, he decided to leave New York to return to India.

In 1999, Dhawan co-founded ChrysCapital in Mumbai with Raj Kondur, a classmate from Harvard Business School.

No== Philanthropy == In 2012, Dhawan left his career as a private equity investor to found Central Square Foundation (CSF), a grant-making organization and policy think tank focused on transforming the quality of school education in India. In 2014, he spearheaded the launch of Ashoka University, billed as India's first "Ivy-league-caliber" liberal arts university, together with other Indian entrepreneurs.

Other organisations launched by Dhawan include the India Leaders for the Social Sector (ILSS), which he set up with Anu Prasad in 2017; the Air Pollution Action Group (APAG) in 2019; and the Centre for Effective Governance of Indian States (CEGIS). a joint effort with economist Karthik Muralidharan.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dhawan and CSF set up the ACT EdTech Ambition Fund, an organisation dedicated to helping deliver education to underprivileged children. He and his wife Manisha set up the Convergence Foundation as an umbrella organisation and grant-making incubator dedicated to promoting growth in India by solving complex socioeconomic problems.

Dhawan endowed the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professorship at Yale University to bolster scholarship in India and South Asia Studies.

Accolades
In 2012, Dhawan was recognized as the NextGen Leader in Philanthropy by Forbes India for his charitable work. He also placed 15th on the 2014 Hurun India Philanthropy List, a ranking of the most generous individuals in India produced by China-based Hurun Research Institute.

Selected articles

 * Dhawan, Ashish (September 16, 2022). "Education policy cannot be business-as-usual after Covid". Financial Times.