Mayank Girdhar

Mayank Girdhar

Managing Director, UpSpark

Mayank Girdhar is a serial business builder, board member, senior advisor, and veteran investor with over two decades of business, growth, innovation and senior leadership experience.

Mayank has co-founded and scaled two successful, award-winning businesses to over $1.5 billion each. As an investor and board member, Mayank has invested in more than 200 companies, deployed several billion dollars of capital and held board roles at numerous portfolio companies.

Mayank’s focus for the last several years has been on deploying his depth of expertise towards addressing the defining issue of the 21st century: climate change.

Mayank is currently a Co-Founder and Managing Director at UpSpark, focussed on climate tech, clean energy, sustainability and deep tech. Mayank is also a Senior Advisor for Project Commercialization and Climate Projects at X, the moonshot factory.

In addition, Mayank has served as a Judge and Advisor for Tech Nation’s Climate Programme (the UK government’s climate tech accelerator), an Innovation Coach for Stanford University’s Ecopreneurship Program, a Climate & Energy Brain Trust Member & Global Visioneer at XPRIZE, a Startup and Domain Expert at venture builder Carbon13, an Advisor and EIR at the Centre for Climate Repair at the University of Cambridge, and an advisor to several startups and growth stage companies.

Prior to building and scaling Bosporus and Black Diamond Europe, Mayank was a Vice President at Dresdner Kleinwort, a strategy consultant at Analysys Mason, an R&D engineer at Motorola and an innovation engineer at Hewlett Packard Labs.

Mayank read Engineering at the University of Cambridge where he graduated with Honours, attended the 20:20 Executive Education programme at INSEAD Business School, and holds a Master’s degree as a Sloan Fellow from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business where he was awarded the Robert L. Joss Scholarship.