Esha Sahai

2013 - 2015

Alumni

Legatum Fellow

From:

India

Sector:

Education

Location:

India

Degree:

SDM, School of Engineering and Sloan School of Management

Esha Sahai is a venture capitalist, entrepreneur, and educator. She is currently a Venture Partner at Varidus, where she supports investments in high potential startups. She is also an Entrepreneur In Residence at the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Esha serves on the board of Tesseract Inc. and Ant Bicycle. As the Founder of Girls Who Venture, she is working towards gender equality in entrepreneurship and venture capital.

Previously she was a Venture Fellow at the Alumni Ventures Group and a member of Microsoft’s Corporate Strategy and Development team for the Cloud & Enterprise and AI divisions. Prior to joining Microsoft, Esha served as a Legatum Fellow at MIT, where she worked on multiple for-profit and non-profit ventures. Her mobile startup Curious Learning was a semi-finalist in MassChallenge & MIT’s 100K. In another venture, she developed a business plan to commercialize MIT BLOSSOMS (Blended Learning Open Source Science or Math Studies), a series of freely available interactive lessons presented in a widely accessible video format, and tested the efficacy of the product in India.

Past stints include Oracle Corp., edX, LearnLaunch Accelerator, and a Techstars startup. Esha has served on the boards for Girls Inc., Circle of Women, UMass Amherst’s Maroon Ventures Fund, GetMAGIC Corp, and SOWCoders.

She was a Bay State Fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science in 2002 and 2004, respectively. Esha has a degree in management and engineering from MIT’s Sloan School of Management.