Mr. Avinash (Avi) Vashistha is Chairman and CEO, Tholons Inc., and Managing Partner at Arise Ventures. He is the former Chairman and CEO of Accenture and prior to that he was the founder of Tholons Capital and neoIT. Earlier he was a senior executive at AT&T Bell Labs and Nortel in the US and UK. Avi is a highly accomplished, Chief Executive and Venture Capitalist with 30+ years of experience in large global projects, CEO/Board level Strategy Consulting, Venture Capital, Digital Transformation, and Innovation.
As Chairman of Accenture, he led a multi-billion-dollar business and a workforce of over 200,000 delivering a >3X growth in 5 years. Avi has done over 100 large globalization deals valued at over USD 50 billion. He has led investments in over 100 companies and has been a Limited Partner in 5 Venture Capital/Private Equity Funds.
Avi has an exceptional network and is a known Thought Leader in the industry and co-authored the book “Innovation at Scale” and “The Offshore Nation” (McGraw-Hill). He has worked with over 500 Global Fortune clients like Goldman Sachs, GM, Chevron, Pfizer, Kaiser Permanente, Vodafone, T-Mobile, SAP, Stanford University, TATA, Bank of America, UBS, SBI, Timken, GE, Walmart, Shell, Exxon Mobil, BMW, Unilever, The Home Depot, Accenture, VISA, CardinalHealth, JP Morgan Chase, P&G, PayPal, Pepsico, John Deere. He has very deep and trusted relationships with CEOs/CXOs of all the major global IT / Consulting companies and the Captive / GIC Forum.
He has been a speaker at more than 300 conferences worldwide and a media personality. He has been an active board and national member of various institutes and chambers and is a Life Fellow of Institute of Directors (IOD). He was a former member of the NASSCOM Executive Council and was Chairman of FICCI Karnataka and Co-Chair of FICCI Education India. Avinash holds an engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, a master’s in computer science from the University of Alberta and executive education from Harvard.