Great Manager Institute (GMI), has onboarded investor-advisors with a fund raise of 283,000 USD. The raise is led by several CXOs of technology companies, including Ramesh Shankar, who headed HR for Siemens South Asia, Srikanth Karra, who is the CHRO of Mphasis, and Bala Malladi, who is the CEO of ACT Fibernet. The company was founded in 2017 by Dalreen Patrao, Prasenjit Bhattacharya, and Ashwin Srivastava.
GMI is a lifetime coach and profiler for people managers, using artificially intelligent coaches and a community of experienced human mentors, to provide personalized sustainable learning to people managers. It claims to solve the “how of high trust performance”. Its last fair market value was 6 million USD and it now plans to raise another round of investment at a valuation of 15 million USD or higher in the coming months, to help propel its global growth even further.
The current raise is expected to go towards branding, technology and research, as per a statement by the company. The statement adds that the company is expanding globally in the next year and needs to have the right India Advisory Board to help it do so. Karra and Shankar have joined the technical advisory committee, while Malladi has joined the India Advisory Board of Great Manager Institute.
Karra gives the reason for his investment, “Great Manager Institute has come out with a timely model of engaging and reskilling the managerial layer which in my view is the spine of an organization.”
Shankar elaborates on the reason of his association, “It is people managers who make the difference between good and great organizations and not technology, brand or anything else. That’s why I decided to be a part of Great Manager Institute.”
Patrao, co-founder of GMI, adds, “Amongst the jobs that are definitely going to be there in the future, people management is amongst the top. This is why what we are doing is so important”.
