Sandeep Farias

Sandeep Farias is Founder & Managing Partner at Elevar Equity. He leads Elevar globally and is responsible for the firm’s strategy and organizational development, while engaging with entrepreneurs in India and Latin America to think through inflection points in their entrepreneurial journeys. Working with Elevar teams in India, United States and Mexico, he plays a key role across markets in determining the firm’s investment priorities, underwriting of new investment opportunities and portfolio management in India and Latin America, and fundraising.

Sandeep has close to 25 years of work experience in diverse areas such as emerging markets investing, governance and regulation, organizational design, transactions and structuring, and corporate law. He founded Elevar in 2008, being passionately driven by working with early stage companies that foster economic development for low income communities; particularly in financial services including MSME finance and microfinance (where he played a leadership role in the sector’s transformation over a decade from the non-profit space to formal banking), affordable education, healthcare and agricultural services.

Sandeep started his career in 1996 after completing an integrated law and arts degree from the National Law School of India University (NLS).  Over the next eight years, he worked mostly on cross border transactions at two leading corporate law firms, Amarchand Mangaldas and Nishith Desai Associates (NDA), worked inhouse on Wipro’s NYSE listing, and taught at NLS. At NDA he led the corporate law team and founded the firm’s award winning social and development sector practice. Prior to founding Elevar, in 2004 he established Unitus in India and actively partnered with some of India’s leading microfinance institutions / banks, which were then in their formative years.

Sandeep is passionate about time with family, design, politics, cycling and good conversations.