Pulak Sinha is an enigma wrapped in a riddle. As he talks, he flits effortlessly between citing the latest technology trends and displaying an uncanny understanding of the financial world he can call his own. His background suggests this duality—with an undergraduate degree from IIT Kanpur and a Master’s from Columbia’s prestigious business school—but his identity is not frozen in time. His approach is one of constant absorption and dynamism, befitting the industry he has built a company to serve: Asset Management and the category he has coined and created: AssetTech.
The business literature is rife with stories of startups and genesis stories, but the memorable ones are those that describe a purpose or a mission. Growing up in a Middle-Class Indian family, Sinha realized that society’s “winners and losers” are defined by their abilities to attract capital- to invest and use for growth. The other side of the coin is “capital allocation” which allows people in charge to anoint certain people or ideas as winners because they receive capital and to suffocate other sectors by withholding capital.
But what if the process wasn’t intentional or data-driven and worked on luck, patronage, and power instead of the merit of ideas? That was the question Sinha knew he had to help answer.
He emigrated to the US to expand this then-current company into new markets and was immediately drawn to study further. After his stint at Columbia, Sinha joined the Financial Services sector, working at both startups and blue-chips in the Asset Allocation and Asset Management spaces. There, as both a technologist and as an operations leader, he learned the Asset Management and Secondaries businesses through and through and noticed a huge opportunity.
The Middle-Office functions within the Secondaries market was an area he identified as in need of help. Optimal capital allocation or “investment management” was not possible without a smooth and connected organization all working from the same source of data truth. Ever the dreamer, he set off to build Pepper, the Cloud-Native Middle-Office in the Cloud for the Secondaries Industry.
Just a few years later, Pepper is a recognized leader in a space that Sinha conjured- AssetTech. World-wide, professional Asset Managers are in charge of allocating and generating ROI on a whopping $120 trillion. All technologies that help these companies leverage data to run better can be considered part of “AssetTech.”
With over $7 billion on the platform and growing at a 40% clip, Pepper is destined for greatness as is Sinha who architected a category out of an insight and a dream
