Some careers follow a well-laid track. Sandesha Jaitapkar's has been anything but. Hers is a journey defined by building from scratch, stepping into day-zero environments and leaving behind structures that last.

Today, as Group COO of Artha Group, she is the operational architect for the top micro-VC in India. Over a decade with the firm, Sandesha has grown through relentless on-the-ground learning, an instinct for order in chaos, and an unflinching ability to match vision with execution. Her perspective, forged across fund cycles, portfolio expansions, and institutional milestones, is one the broader industry has begun to take note of.

Long before venture capital, she had already developed a pattern of shaping things from the ground up. At EY-Parthenon (then Parthenon), she was part of the founding setup, creating the frameworks and assembling the teams that would support the firm's early ambitions. These formative roles gave her not just a toolkit, but the muscle memory for what it takes to turn a blank slate into a working, scalable system.

At Artha, she has applied this mindset to a far larger canvas. Over the years, she has crafted cross-functional workflows, embedded automation and generative AI across the Group's verticals, and built systems that keep pace with both the agility of a startup and the discipline of an institutional fund, navigating governance, data security, and the human complexity that enterprise-wide AI adoption inevitably brings. The result is an organisation where operational complexity has been distilled into clarity, and where culture has been preserved even as scale has accelerated.

Her work has not gone unnoticed. In 2023, TradeFlock Magazine named her among India's Top 10 COOs, recognising her rare ability to blend strategic oversight with operational precision. The recognition reflects not only her contributions to Artha but her broader influence as a voice in the entrepreneurial and academic communities. She is a sought-after guest lecturer at IIMs, IITs, and other leading institutions, where she speaks on scaling strategies, leadership culture, and the systems that underpin long-term success. She is frequently invited to join panels at industry forums, sharing insights on hiring, process design, and the human side of operations, and her writing has earned her a following for a style that is as sharp as it is reflective: stories and analogies that turn operational truths into leadership lessons.

She believes systems outlast motivation; those well-designed processes free people to focus on what truly matters; and that resilience is built not in moments of glory, but in the quiet discipline of showing up every day.

As Artha moves into its next phase of expansion, and as the fund industry reckons with what it means to institutionalise AI truly, Sandesha continues to shape its operational DNA with the same principle that has guided her career from the start: build it right the first time and build it to last.