Akshay Chaturvedi
Founder & CEO, Leverage
Akshay Chaturvedi is the Founder & CEO of Leverage, the world’s largest talent mobility platform built for emerging markets. Anchored in India and operating across 18 source countries, spanning South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Leverage powers the full lifecycle of cross-border talent: education, upskilling, careers, financial services, and relocation. For universities and employers across 27 destination countries, it offers an AI product-suite for global talent recruitment and planning. For individuals, a 360-degree stack from admissions and financing to housing and career placement.
Incubated by DFJ Ventures’ Tim Draper in Silicon Valley, Leverage over the last 9 years has partnered with leading investors from world over on the journey, including ETS, Blume Ventures, Kaizenvest Private Equity, DSG Consumer Partners, DSP Mutual Fund, Tomorrow Capital, Spring Marketing Capital, Sterling Partners, Bennett Coleman Group, as well as leading family offices of Binny Bansal, Mithun Sacheti, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Mankind promoter Rajeev Juneja, Capri Global, Indorama Corporation, Lodha Group among others. It now spans 27 countries across 60+ offices, operating multiple products / brands: Leverage Edu, Univalley.ai, Fly Finance, Fly Homes, Leverage Careers, SO-360. An obsession with making every single customer interaction an 11/10 is the core DNA of the 1000+ team spread across all continents (except Antarctica ~ since nobody is moving there or from there at the moment!)
The company’s impact now touches hundreds of thousands of lives across emerging economies – students pursuing global education, professionals building international careers, and institutions accessing a pipeline of talent from the world’s youngest and fastest-growing populations. Leverage has built a dense network of source-to-destination corridors that spans continents, positioning it uniquely at the intersection of the Global South’s demographic dividend and the developed world’s growing talent deficit.
An ISB Hyderabad graduate and now Board Member of its Entrepreneurship School, Akshay was named a CNBC Young Turk in 2019. Next, he was listed on Forbes India’s 30Under30, and subsequently on Forbes Asia’s 30Under30 in early 2020. And later that year, he received the TiE Entrepreneurial Excellence Award. Under his leadership, Leverage was listed in the Deloitte Tech Fast 50 list in 2022 as one of India’s fastest growing companies.
In a significant recognition of his global influence, Akshay was in early 2025 inducted as a Fellow at St. George’s House, Windsor Castle, founded in the 1960s by Prince Edward. He was one of only two Indian entrepreneurs selected globally for this honour. He is a member of the core Founders’ Circle of the British Asian Trust, a philanthropic initiative founded by His Majesty King Charles III to advance education and opportunity in South Asia. He was also among a dozen select delegates invited to spend a weekend at the Pope’s Gardens in Vatican City in late 2025, as a member of the Guild of the Harambeans Alliance, recognising Leverage’s pioneering work in building talent mobility pathways from Africa to Europe – one of several emerging-market corridors the company now operates.
