Shailendra Tipparaju

An active serial entrepreneur, technologist and an executive coach, Shailendra Tipparaju (Shailu) has a cross-industry global footprint spanning over two decades. He has been a founding member of several Education Technology companies from concept to scale before successful exits, that have generated an enterprise value of over half a billion dollars.

Shailu also serves as the chairman of Chicago based Colosseum Group, a global brand of companies that focuses on investments, incubation, research, engineering, education, and creative brand communications. As the Vice-Chairman of Atal Balachandran Great Lakes Incubation AGBI, Shailu has helped foster entrepreneurship by mentoring, investing and advising over 50 companies.

Prior to his current active roles, he has been a founding member of EdAssist (acquired by Bain Capital Bright Horizons in 2010), Strateology (by University Ventures in 2017), and Examity (by Great Hill Partners in 2019). Between 2008 to 2013, he led the Technology Innovation program at CVS Pharmacy, a Fortune 10 company, to head implementations of shared services platforms. His first stint started as an intern in 1999 at Xerox innovation group (then part of Motorola division) and grew to lead several successful global engineering initiatives at Motorola, Delta Airlines, and GlaxoSmithKline. He was Xerox’s top performing employee worldwide in 2015.

A widely published author and speaker, Shailu has been recognized as one of the top 100 Education pioneers in 2020 and is an active contributor in various standardized and certification global councils in the EdTech domain. A patriot, artist, musician, educator, and a strong family-man, Shailu believes in purposeful balanced living and compassionate capitalism. He heads up the Colosseum Foundation with a mission to create self-belief in individuals and guide the next generations to use entrepreneurship as a medium to build global ties, showcase global patriotism blended with compassionate capitalism, and promote the culture, heritage and spirit of intellectuality, hospitality, and spirituality globally.

A lifelong learner, Shailu has a Bachelor’s in Chemical Engineering from Osmania University, Hyderabad, India and a Master’s in Computer Science from Loyola University, Chicago. He is currently pursuing a management program at the Harvard Business School at Boston. He lives in Chicago with his wife and best friend of more than two decades, Sireesha, and his two super-hero sons, Dhanush and Ankush.