Co-founder, CEO& MD, Head Held High Services
Madan Padaki is the Co-founder, CEO & Managing Director of Head Held High Services, a rural access accelerator that unleashes the power of the Ruban (a term for the neo rural-urbans) by providing career access to youth, business access to entrepreneurs and market access to corporates. Started as a foundation in 2008, Head Held High trains zero/low-educated rural youth, transforming them to be knowledge workers in record times and enabling careers in the rural areas itself. HHH Services also operates a rural BPO in Tumkur, Karnataka from where it delivers high-end processes leveraging the talent of our low-educated trainees. This has won several awards, including the CNN IBN Real Heroes Award, 2011, Global Sourcing Council Award 2011, Finalist at Mahindra Rise 2012, etc.
Partnering with other Education leaders, Madan is also a co-founder & Director of Sylvant– a pioneering initiative to create a robust scaffolding for education entrepreneurs to succeed. Sylvant invests and supports early stage education entrepreneurs and has a current portfolio of 4 companies globally.
An engineer from NIE Mysore and an MBA from SPJIMR, Mumbai, Madan had worked with Wipro, Infosys and Mphasis (Japan) – before being bitten by the entrepreneurial bug in 2000 when he co-founded MeritTrac – as a pioneering idea in skills assessments. MeritTrac is today India’s Largest Skills Assessment company and is recognized as a thought-leader in the sector. MeritTrac was acquired by Manipal Global Education Services, one of India’s largest education services company. In 2011, Madan moved to Manipal head up Strategy, Innovation and International Partnerships for Manipal Education and transitioned out in March 2013 to take a full-time role in Head Held High Services.
He is also on the Governing Council of TiE Bangalore, Indo-American Chamber of Commerce, Karnataka and is a founding Partner of Social Venture Partners, Bangalore.
