Srikumar Misra

Srikumar Misra is an Indian serial entrepreneur known for founding Milk Mantra, a dairy foods company based in Odisha. Misra launched the company in 2009, and it was India's first agri-foods company to get venture capital backing. Before this, Misra was a director at Tetley and a senior executive at the Tata Group. He was also part of Yale University's World Fellows Program in 2021. His work has been included in case studies at business schools like Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. He has also been extensively featured in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Forbes, Fortune, Economic Times, and Financial Times.

Education
Misra was born in Cuttack, Odisha. He earned a masters degree in business administration from Xavier Institute of Management and pursued a postgraduate program from the University of Texas at Austin.

Career
Misra headed the mergers and acquisitions department at Tetley, a London-based tea company owned by the Tata Group. He left this job to set up a food business to address the trust issues between consumers and food in India, caused by opaque supply chains and adulterated food. Along with his wife Rashima Misra, he founded a dairy food company called Milk Mantra in Bhubaneswar in August 2009. They spent two years raising funds from 22 angel investors and Aavishkaar Venture Capital.

Milk Mantra began operations in 2012. Misra launched the ready-to-drink milk beverage MooShake. The brand was piloted in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, where it gained popularity. He received a patent for MooShake in the US. In 2013, Stanford Business School did a three-part case study on Milk Mantra and Aavishkaar about raising VC funding in India. In June 2016, RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan visited Milk Mantra's plant and met its management, employees and some women farmers to understand the business model of the startup which sources its main product, milk from 40,000 farmers in the state through the Ethical Milk Sourcing (EMS) programme. In 2018, during a state visit to Bhubaneswar for the 'Commonwealth Lunch', the British High Commissioner to the Republic of India, Dominic Asquith, his wife and the Deputy High Commissioner, Bruce Bucknell, visited the Milk Mantra office.

In 2014, Misra received the Emerging Business Leader Award for his work supporting rural entrepreneurs in Odisha. In 2016, he received the John P. McNulty Prize for his innovative social impact ventures.