Associate Director – Entrepreneurship

About PRAGATI

Rural India is central to India’s economic future, accounting for 63% of the population and 70% of the workforce. Yet a large share of rural livelihoods remains concentrated in relatively low-productivity agriculture, creating a significant opportunity to shift towards higher-income economic activity.

PRAGATI (Programme for Rural Advancement, Growth and Transformative Initiatives) is a TCF-incubated organisation focused on accelerating economic prosperity in rural India. Its work is centred on two priorities:

• Increasing agricultural incomes by addressing structural constraints across land, inputs, finance, markets, processing and trade.
• Creating scalable non-farm livelihoods by identifying, financing and supporting promising rural enterprises that can generate local jobs.

PRAGATI works with central ministries and state governments to combine policy and economic analysis with hands-on implementation. It identifies high-potential opportunities, partners with relevant government institutions, tests solutions on the ground, and develops models that governments can ultimately own and replicate.

Role Summary

PRAGATI believes entrepreneurship can be an important engine of non-farm employment and income growth in rural India. Yet promising rural enterprises often fall between existing sources of support—too ambitious for traditional livelihood programmes, too risky or collateral-light for conventional bank lending, and often too early or small for mainstream institutional capital. PRAGATI’s approach is therefore to help build an ecosystem that can identify promising entrepreneurs, provide the support required to build stronger enterprises, and create appropriate pathways to capital and scale.

The Associate Director – Entrepreneurship will lead this agenda. The role sits at the intersection of entrepreneurship, investing, capital formation and ecosystem building and requires someone who understands both how investors evaluate opportunities and what it takes to build a business in practice.

A key part of the role will be to help develop new financing mechanisms for rural enterprises. These may include government-backed investment vehicles in which the government provides anchor capital, while investment decisions and fund management are undertaken independently by professional fund managers. PRAGATI’s role would be to help shape the architecture, build alignment among stakeholders and enable the right ecosystem partnerships—not to manage these funds itself.

The individual will therefore need to move comfortably between entrepreneurs, investors and government—assessing businesses, understanding capital gaps, engaging potential fund managers and investors, and helping design institutional solutions that can mobilise significantly more capital into rural enterprise.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop a clear point of view on where entrepreneurship can create meaningful rural jobs and incomes, which types of enterprises have potential to scale, and where PRAGATI can add distinctive value.
• Determine the most appropriate forms of capital for different enterprises—including debt, equity, venture debt, guarantees, blended finance and other patient or risk-capital instruments.
• Work with government and ecosystem partners to conceptualise investment structures that can catalyse private and impact capital, including professionally managed funds anchored by government or other institutional LPs.
• Build trusted relationships with venture capital and impact funds, banks, NBFCs, development finance institutions and other providers of capital, and develop a strong understanding of their investment mandates and decision criteria.
• Develop partnerships with accelerators, corporates, industry experts, government institutions, financial institutions and market-access partners that can improve enterprise survival and growth.
• Identify recurring constraints in finance, regulation, markets or capability and develop mechanisms that address these at ecosystem or policy level rather than enterprise by enterprise.
• Identify promising entrepreneurs and evaluate opportunities across market potential, business model, unit economics, founder quality, execution capability, scalability and employment potential.
• Build a high-performing entrepreneurship team with strong commercial judgment, analytical rigour, ownership and empathy for founders.

Qualifications and Skills

We are looking for someone with 10+ years of high-quality professional experience, ideally combining substantial exposure to institutional investing with first-hand entrepreneurial or operating experience.

The strongest candidates are likely to have spent a meaningful part of their career in venture capital, impact investing, private equity, venture debt, banking, development finance or a similar institutional investment environment. Having founded, built or held a significant operating role in an entrepreneurial organisation would be particularly valuable.

Candidates should demonstrate:

• Deep understanding of the entrepreneurship and investment ecosystem, including how enterprises progress from early validation through growth and institutional capital.
• Experience engaging institutional investors and an understanding of how funds are structured, governed and deployed.
• Familiarity with different forms of capital and, ideally, experience with fund design, blended-finance structures, public-private investment vehicles or institutional LP arrangements.
• The ability to engage credibly with the government on financing structures while also understanding the requirements of professional investors and fund managers.
• A strong network—or the ability to build one quickly—across investors, entrepreneurs, financial institutions and the broader enterprise ecosystem.
• Significant experience assessing investment opportunities, including markets, business models, management teams, unit economics, financial projections and risk.
• Strong commercial judgment and the ability to distinguish genuinely scalable enterprises from businesses unlikely to sustain themselves or attract follow-on capital.
• Strong financial and analytical skills, alongside the judgment to make decisions where information is incomplete.
• Strong people leadership, communication and stakeholder-management skills.
• High ownership and a strong orientation towards sustainable enterprises, capital mobilised and jobs created, rather than programme activity alone.

Pragati