Madan Padaki

Founder & CEO, 1Bridge

Co-founder & Managing Trustee, Head Held High Foundation Co-founder, Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME) President, TiE Bangalore

Strategic Advisor, UNICEF India

Co-Convenor Karnataka Skills & Entrepreneurship Task Force, Govt. of Karnataka

An entrepreneur working at the intersection of transforming youth, enabling entrepreneurial journeys & empowering social changemakers – with a that every youth is an empowered youth, every empowered youth is an entrepreneur & job-creator and every entrepreneur is a social changemaker!

Linkedin: madanpadaki Twitter: @madanpadaki

An engineer from NIE Mysore and an MBA from SPJIMR, Madan has 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 and scaled it rapidly as India’s first and one of the largest skills assessment companies. Fast Company recognized MeritTrac as the Top 10 Innovative Companies in India in 2009. MeritTrac was acquired by Manipal Global Education Services, one of India’s largest education services company. In 2011, he moved to Manipal Education to head up Strategy, Innovation and

International Partnerships, and transitioned out in March 2013 – listening to his heart to embark on a journey as a changemaker.

In 2009, he co-founded Head Held High Foundation, a non-profit that stands for human dignity. HHH focuses on initiatives for poverty eradication like Make India Capable, where a rural youth with no schooling is transformed into work-ready professionals and Global Action on Poverty (GAP) a platform that builds and supports Changemaking communities to eradicate poverty. With a vision of transforming rural youth to be entrepreneurs, he founded 1Bridge in 2014 as a platform that empowers rural entrepreneurs to accelerate abundance of access, choice & convenience to rural citizens, leveraging technology. Today, 1Bridge is present in 70+ districts across South & East India and has over 7000+ rural entrepreneurs engaged in delivering services to rural consumers.

In 2018, he co-founded Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME), a network that aims to catalyse large-scale job creation by bringing together Government, Businesses & Civil Society organisations to work collaboratively on igniting a mass entrepreneurship movement

Since 2018, he has served as a Strategy Advisor to UNICEF India for a large initiative on youth empowerment called YuWaah and works closely with the UNICEF/YuWaah team with a vision to create 300 million youth as Changemakers & Leaders. Madan has been appointed as the Co-Convenor of the Skills & Entrepreneurship Taskforce, set-up by Govt. of Karnataka to galvanise public-private collaboration in order to create 10 million economic opportunities for youth.

He has been an active member of Governing Council of TiE Bangalore since 2010 and in 2021, got elected as the President of TiE Bangalore. As a part of the Governing Council of #CovidActionCollab, he plays an active role in driving the economic resilience impact canvas for the Collaborative. He is also Advisory Board Member, Youth for Seva and has served as a Senior Advisor to Tata Trusts between 2015-2016. Partnering with other Education leaders, Madan is also a co-founder & Director of Sylvant Advisors. Sylvant invests and supports education entrepreneurs like Lodestar, Littlemore, PALGenie GuruG, EntLogics, KopyKitab, etc.

Madan is a sought-after speaker at various conferences around the world and has shared his innovative ideas & thoughts at prestigious forums like TEDxIIM Bangalore, TEDxGateway, INK Conference, etc. In Jan 2021, he was conferred the Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award by India CSR Network. He was also invited by Prime Minister Modi to share his ideas at the Champions of Change Conclave in 2017.