Ashok Ananthakrishnan

Ashok has over 21 years of experience in start-ups or start-up like environments within established companies in India. As a serial entrepreneur, he brings expertise in opportunity assessment, business plan development, brand Identity orchestration, offline retail and sales & business development. Ashok co-led Iron Pillar’s investment in FreshToHome and also spends significant time on operational aspects of BlueStone.

Before co-founding Iron Pillar, Ashok was the Co-Founder and CEO of Taxiguide.in, a pioneering (a year ahead of Ola and Uber in India) online portal bringing car rental operators and customers on one platform. Prior to this he spent 5 years at ICICI Bank and DBS Bank building their SME (Emerging Clusters) and Mid-Market (Enterprise) Banking businesses in Karnataka from scratch. Earlier, he was the Co-Founder and Project Director of Vertebrand Management Consulting, a boutique strategy consulting firm where he was responsible for delivery of consulting assignments for brands such as W, Ethos, SmithKline Beecham Pharma, Taj Group of Hotels, TI Cycles, Greaves Cotton, Featherlite, Hewlett Packard India Software Operations, TVS tyres and Titan. He began his career with S.B.Billimoria and Co in their Management Consulting Division.

Ashok earned a PGDBA from ICFAI Business School, Bangalore, a CFA from ICFAI, Hyderabad and a B.E (Mechanical) from Bangalore University.