Head of Investment and Management — Data Centres
Bringing data centre expertise to India for an alternatives platform.
Kotak Alternate Asset Managers
Kotak Alternate Asset Managers
Kotak Alternate Asset Managers is the alternative assets arm of the Kotak Mahindra Group, managing private equity, real estate, infrastructure, special situations and data centre investments in India since 2005.
- Role
- Head of Investment and Management — Data Centres
- Sector
- Alternatives platform, real assets, data centres
- Location
- Mumbai
- Outcome
- Successfully placed
Mandates led by Avneesh Raghuvanshi over the course of his career at previous firms, before Antik Consultants was established in August 2026.
The situation
- Situation that led to the mandate
- Our client was looking to make significant capital commitments to building data centres in India. They did not have the required skill sets in-house and were keen to hire an expert.
- Market
- Talent pool in India, or Indians overseas, with experience keeping in mind the ask above.
- Timing
- Our commitment was to deliver the shortlisted candidates within 4–6 weeks.
Client need
It was important that the person should be a specialist in setting up and managing data centres.
It was also important that the person should have hands-on expertise in bidding for contracts — pricing, deliverables, timelines — and strong negotiation skills.
The challenge
To identify, convince and evaluate candidates with the work experience required for the role. As very few data centres were in existence in India, we had to identify candidates in the western world and convince them to relocate to India. AWS, Meta and Google were the three most sought-after customers, and hence they were going to be off limits, constraining the talent pool even further.
The appointment
Appointee
Mr Subhamkar Das
- ex-VP and Head — Data Centre Design & Build, Nxtra Data Limited
Impact after the appointment
Subhamkar helped define the strategy and set up the processes and founding team for the business, before joining AWS, which became a client for our client.
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