Pranay Agrawal

Co-Founder & CEO Fractal

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Pranay Agrawal is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Fractal, a global artificial intelligence and decision intelligence firm founded in Mumbai in 2000 and now publicly listed on India’s National Stock Exchange and Bombay Stock Exchange. Fractal’s proposition is that the hard part of enterprise analytics is not building models but changing decisions — embedding analytical output into the places where large organizations actually choose between options, which is as much an organizational problem as a technical one. Agrawal was one of five founders, spent sixteen years in the business before becoming chief executive in 2016, and has since taken it through institutional backing from TPG Growth and Apax Partners to a public listing, serving more than 50 Fortune 500 clients.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Fractal in Mumbai in 2000 with four others, and was appointed Chief Executive Officer in 2016.
• Led the company to a public listing, with Fractal Analytics Limited trading as FRACTAL on the NSE and 544700 on the BSE.
• Raised institutional capital from TPG Growth and Apax Partners.
• Built the firm to serve more than 50 Fortune 500 companies.
• Received the Young Alumni Achievers Award in Entrepreneurship from IIM Ahmedabad in fiscal 2019.
• Named among Analytics India Magazine’s Top 20 CEOs of Data Science Service Providers in 2023.
• Holds a Certified Financial Risk Manager designation from the Global Association of Risk Professionals.

Professional Journey

Agrawal took a Bachelor of Commerce at Bangalore University and a Post Graduate Diploma in Management at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and began his career in banking, working at ICICI Bank and ANZ Grindlays Bank. He also earned the Financial Risk Manager certification from the Global Association of Risk Professionals — a background in quantitative risk that maps directly onto what Fractal would later sell, since risk management was one of the first corporate functions to take statistical modelling seriously.

In 2000 he co-founded Fractal in Mumbai alongside Srikanth Velamakanni, Nirmal Palaparthi, Pradeep Suryanarayan, and Ramakrishna Reddy. The company entered a market that barely existed: large enterprises held enormous quantities of transactional data and had very little capacity to draw decisions from it, and the offshore analytics industry that now serves them had not yet formed. Fractal positioned itself not as a data processing vendor but as a decision intelligence firm, working on the consumer goods, financial services, and healthcare problems where better prediction translates directly into margin.

Agrawal spent sixteen years in senior roles before being appointed Chief Executive Officer in 2016, taking operational leadership while co-founder Srikanth Velamakanni moved to Group Chief Executive and Executive Vice-Chairman — a redistribution among founders rather than a succession following a departure. Under his leadership the firm attracted institutional investment from TPG Growth and later Apax Partners, expanded internationally, and built a client base of more than 50 Fortune 500 companies.

That trajectory culminated in a public listing, with Fractal Analytics Limited now trading on both the National Stock Exchange and the Bombay Stock Exchange — placing it among the small number of Indian analytics and AI firms to reach the public markets. He received IIM Ahmedabad’s Young Alumni Achievers Award in Entrepreneurship in fiscal 2019 and was named among Analytics India Magazine’s Top 20 CEOs of Data Science Service Providers in 2023.

Education

Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad

Post Graduate Diploma in Management

Bangalore University

Bachelor of Commerce