We are a small team with a big vision…
Team
Save Groundwater Foundation has a strong and dedicated team focused on one thing – replenishing groundwater at scale using the proven JalTara methodology.
Manu and Akiva met at Morgan Stanley on their first day of work. While “outsiders” in the water sector, they have delivered success by applying first-principles thinking and technology discipline to a space dominated by conventional approaches.
Manu Namboodiri
Founder and President
Manu has held product, strategy, and marketing leadership roles at Sun, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and multiple startups. He holds an MBA from Kellogg and an MS in CS from UT Austin. Manu’s product management mindset shaped JalTara from the start — the 2021 proof of concept was run as an MVP with A/B testing, and the scaling approach has been a deliberate exercise in standardization and constraint removal.
Akiva Elias
Co-Founder and Vice President
Spent 15 years at Morgan Stanley in senior IT leadership roles across New York and Mumbai — including building the firm’s offshore IT organization in India. He then served as COO at Avendus Capital and was a tech leader at MSCI. He holds an MBA from Wharton and an MS in ECE from Carnegie Mellon. Akiva brings operational scaling experience — managing 300-person organizations and $40M budgets — directly applicable to SGF’s transition from startup to institutional-scale operator.
Team - India
Dr. Purushottam Wayal
Director Programs, India
Dr Wayal is a co-founder of JalTara methodology and a key team member. He leads the on-field execution of JalTara in the villages with his team.
He is a Professor, a farmer, an expert in agricultural practices and has designed and implemented multiple water and environmental projects in rural villages across Maharashtra for nearly two decades.
He is an AOL teacher and lives in Jalna, Maharashtra with his family.
Roy de Souza
Director, India
Roy de Souza is a tech and biotech entrepreneur. His company, BreakBio Corp, aims to solve one of the big remaining problems of our lifetime: cancer.
Previously, Roy was the founder of ZEDO Inc, which he sold to Warner Bros Discovery.
Roy has a Masters in Engineering and Economics from Oxford University and an MBA from Kellogg. Roy was recently recognized by the American Cancer Society for his work on curing cancer.
