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This is how entrepreneurship will change in 2023
Born out of difficult circumstances, new entrepreneurs see opportunities to build socially minded businesses to tackle the world's most crucial challenges.
Rishi Khosla
Rishi Khosla is an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and investor. He is the CEO and co-founder of leading financial technology company, OakNorth, which is focused on helping SMEs scale.
Rishi is a champion of entrepreneurs - who he feels are the real drivers of innovation, social progress, and economic growth - and believes that everyone can prosper by adopting an entrepreneurial mindset.
This vision led Rishi to build his first business, Copal Partners (which later became Copal Amba) in 2002 with his business partner, Joel Perlman. Together, they grew the business to 3,000 employees across 11 markets, before selling it to Moody’s Corporation in 2014.
In 2015, they launched OakNorth with the aim of empowering high-growth businesses struggling to access fast, flexible finance; what OakNorth calls the ‘Missing Middle’. OakNorth developed ON Credit Intelligence to transform commercial banking, making it more granular, data-driven and forward-looking. The neobank, which began as an entrepreneurial vision, has supported the creation of tens of thousands of new jobs across the UK, and is helping tackle the UK’s housing crisis through supporting the development of tens of thousands of new social and affordable homes.
Rishi Khosla is dedicated to promoting a culture of entrepreneurialism and empowering the entrepreneurial mindset in others. He does so personally through his involvement in initiatives such as a ‘Mentorpreneurship’ Programme in partnership with the London School of Economics https://info.lse.ac.uk/staff/divisions/research-and-innovation/generate/mentorpreneurship
Through his family foundation, he supports work to nurture agency, creativity, and curiosity in early childhood development that will enable people to unleash their potential later in life, as well as supporting medical research into rare diseases, and initiatives which support female empowerment.
Rishi is an early-stage investor in Paypal and Indiabulls, with other investments including About Energy (battery technology), Spiracheck (biotech), and Xometry (3D printing and manufacturing).
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