Gaurav Punia

Director - Portfolio Value Creation Team. India.

"Digital ecosystem is driving innovation in India. It is rare to be a part of even one of such startups; to be able to help several create impact is a privilege."

Growing up, Gaurav’s parents were his biggest inspiration, consistently guiding him to be the best that he can be, in whatever he chooses to do. This continues to be the driving force behind most decisions that he takes. 

Gaurav is an operator at heart. At Lightspeed, he leads the portfolio value creation team and works closely with our founders to iterate through operating and execution plans, provide an outside-in perspective through benchmarks, cross portfolio synergies, advisory network of tenured operators and helps them identify additional growth levers. “We have been 0-to-1 builders and 1-to-10 scalers. Think of us as thought partners, who will also roll up their sleeves,” said Gaurav. 

Prior to Lightspeed, he built the largest business at Rivigo (an Indian logistics startup) from scratch and was managing a team of 3000+ people. Prior to Rivigo, Gaurav was an engagement manager at McKinsey&Company and supported clients through transformations, restructuring, GTM, margin improvement and strategy formulation. 

Gaurav earned his MBA at Indian School of Business, where he was institute rank 1 and Engineering from Delhi College of Engineering, where he was department rank 1. 

Any free time that Gaurav has, is spent with his family, traveling to offbeat locations, building itineraries for future travel and pushing himself at sports (boxing, crossfit, lifting).