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Dilip JamesSenior Advisor

Dilip has been a Senior Advisor to Elevar since 2022.

Dilip has over 35 years of management experience in Retail, Distribution and IT enabled consumer & service businesses. Before Elevar, he was a venture partner & strategic advisor with Accel. In this role, Dilip provided strategic & operating support to various companies in Accel’s growth portfolio and served as observer on their boards. Prior to this, for two years he was Executive VP & COO at Reliance Retail, responsible for marketing and operations of the Wholesale and Distribution formats. In the nineties he worked for seven years with one of India’s top business houses – the RPG group – in various CXO level positions at group companies Spencer and Saregama. He was part of the core team at Spencer & Co that spearheaded setting up the first organized retail formats in India – Foodworld, Music World and Health & Glow.

Subsequently as an entrepreneur, he was cofounder of the network infrastructure management company, Netsol. He built Netsol into India’s largest privately held network infrastructure player with over 1200 technical staff, which in 2005 was acquired by IBM Global Services.

Dilip blends strategic and operational understanding of consumer / retail business as well as application of technology across businesses. In the past he has been a contributor on matters of business & topical interest to leading financial dailies. He has served as director on the Board of one of India’s leading Microfinance Institutions, on behalf of a global social sector fund. He holds a B.Tech degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT(BHU). Dilip is an avid squash player and loves trekking in the hill ranges when time permits.