Ipshita Mandal-Johnson

Founding Partner & CEO

Ipshita is passionate about building inclusive, innovative and sustainable systems and serves as the Founding Partner & CEO of GBF. She envisioned the “Venture builder” idea back in 2011 and overtime re-focused it with values of impact, knowledge, service to others and wellbeing.

Ipshita has worked with academia, corporates and ministries in biotechnology, health, deep technology and financial services. She has led strategy, policy and implementation projects in policy development, capacity building, business development, fundraising and transformation. She started her career in New Zealand and has since worked in the US, UK and India amongst others.

She started building start-ups in college and is currently working on her 12th venture builder fund (previous 6 operational for profit companies/ CIC/ charities, 1 exit- Nanna Therapeutics). She has been involved in companies with market leading fundraises/valuations/financial returns with a strong impact focus.
One of her career highlights was co-founding the Global Biotech Revolution / GapSummit – the world’s first inter-generational platform for the bio-economy. To date the summits have brought together 600 Leaders of Tomorrow from 72 countries to debate with 300 Leaders of Today, building 18 companies that have raised independent funding.
In addition, she has worked in McKinsey in the India and NY offices primarily worked in the technology, healthcare and public sector practices. She has led the development of Government of India’s “Digital India 2.0” strategy and was also the Chief of Staff for a M&A deal valued at over 50Bn USD.

She currently serves on the boards of Global Engineering Futures and Chiasma NZ, is a Judge on Mass Challenge and iGEM, is a Visiting Lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health and University of Cambridge, and is a member of the UNAIDS HIEx Investors Council.
She has received multiple awards including thrice being listed in the 50 Movers and Shakers in Bio Business, St Gallen Leader of Tomorrow and an inaugural 40 under 40 for University of Auckland. She has written or been interviewed on Nasdaq, Nature Careers and The Economist Intelligence Unit and been a speaker at Foreign Policy, Global BioEconomy Summit and Graduate Women in Science amongst others.

She has a PhD from the University of Cambridge and a BTech (Hons) from the
University of Auckland.