IIM Bangalore launches Tony James Centre of Excellence for Private Equity and Venture Capital

Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIM Bangalore or IIMB) has established India’s first Private Equity and Venture Capital (PEVC) Centre of Excellence, named the “Tony James Centre for PEVC”. The centre honours Hamilton Evans “Tony” James, former president, COO, and executive vice chairman of Blackstone, an investment firm. The centre aims to be a platform for “research, education, industry collaboration, policy engagement, and talent development”.

The IIMB private equity centre was formalised with an alumni contribution by Post Graduate Programme (PGP) 1994 alumnus Mathew Cyriac, institute gold medallist, 2025 Distinguished Alumni Award (DAA) recipient, chairman of Florintree Advisors, and co-founder at Yali Capital.

Cyriac’s contribution supports the establishment of the centre, along with the naming of four classrooms after “eminent” finance area faculty and several PGP and doctoral scholarships.

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The faculty legacy classrooms at IIMB were named in honour of Late Prakash G Apte, Prasanna Chandra, S Sundararajan, and George Varughese. The honourees thanked Cyriac for his “remarkable purity of soul”.

IIM Bangalore Centre of Excellence

“I was very interested in building something from the ground up. Considering that IIMB is one of the nation’s highest-ranked B-schools with a finance specialisation, I wanted to reinforce that position,” said Cyriac. He also remarked that the new centre of excellence will engage with students, young professionals, PE firms, the IIMB academic research community, and limited partners (LP) who will provide the capital for funds to invest.

Tony James graced the event and explained why India needs a private equity system despite having a “robust” public equity system: “PE and VC have been powerful engines of growth. We couldn’t have the burgeoning transformational entrepreneurial sector that distinguishes the USA from other nations without this kind of capital.”

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James added that these markets lower the cost of capital, speed up access to funds, and enable companies to scale faster.

Other dignitaries present at the IIMB centre inauguration included Sourav Mukherji, dean, alumni relations and development, IIMB, Dinesh Kumar, director-in-charge, IIMB, Thampy, the Florintree chair at IIMB PEVC centre, Vivek Pandit, senior partner and global co-leader, PE and principal investors at McKinsey, and Sanjiv Mehta, executive chairman, L Catterton India.