Apostrophe Ventures Names Three Managing Partners

Divya Narayan, Saji Abraham and Leila Bilimoria Surti, Managing Partners at Apostrophe Ventures

Apostrophe Ventures has appointed Divya Narayan, Leila Bilimoria Surti and Saji Abraham as Managing Partners, and named technology entrepreneur Hardev Dhindsa as its Chief Technology and AI Advisor, in an announcement made on 25 August.

Firm: Apostrophe Ventures, the communications and advisory platform founded by Ameer Ismail
Managing Partners: Divya Narayan, Leila Bilimoria Surti, Saji Abraham
Also appointed: Hardev Dhindsa, Chief Technology and AI Advisor
Combined experience across the three partners: more than seven decades
Remit: corporate and brand communications, public relations, reputation and crisis management, brand and marketing strategy, creative and content, digital and social influence

Ameer Ismail, Founder and CEO of Apostrophe Ventures, on why the firm was created

What Each Managing Partner Brings To Apostrophe Ventures

Divya Narayan comes from the senior communications team at Amazon India, running integrated communications, executive positioning and reputation management across its consumer businesses. Her earlier career covers Lintas Live, then known as GolinOpinion, along with Edelman and Ruder Finn.

Leila Bilimoria Surti ran her own marketing and communications firm before this, and spent more than twelve years at Lintas Live across corporate and financial communications, lifestyle, hospitality, travel, FMCG and food and beverage. She also led external communications for Barclays Global Retail and Commercial Bank in India for two years, and began at Edelman in New York.

Saji Abraham is the outlier of the three, in that he is not a communications person. He comes to the firm from Classic Legends, where he was chief marketing officer and worked on the revival of Jawa, Yezdi and BSA, and before that spent a long stretch at Lowe Lintas. For the past five years he has run Fighting Fit Brands, his own brand and communication consultancy. He holds Effie, WARC, AME and Cannes recognition.

A Bench Assembled Almost Entirely From One Lineage

Two of the three came through Lintas Live and the third through Lowe Lintas. That is not a coincidence, and it is the most telling detail in the release.

Firms built this way are betting on a working shorthand that already exists. People who have argued over the same accounts in the same building need no runway to learn how each other think, which is worth a great deal in the first year of a young firm and worth rather less in the fifth, when the risk becomes a leadership group that agrees with itself too easily.

Advertising Strategy Sitting Inside A Communications Firm

Saji Abraham’s appointment is the one that changes the shape of the offering. A PR firm hiring a former agency planner and category CMO is buying the ability to sell brand strategy alongside reputation work, which is the boundary most independent communications shops stop at.

That ambition is visible in the remit itself, which stretches from crisis management to creative and content to social influence. The question every integrated pitch eventually faces is whether one firm can be credible across all of it, or whether the client simply buys the two services it trusts and takes the rest elsewhere.

An AI Advisor Named In The Same Breath

Hardev Dhindsa is a technology entrepreneur who has built global businesses, and his brief is to work with the leadership team on AI-enabled platforms and solutions and to advise on emerging technology as it develops.

Naming him in the leadership announcement rather than a separate one is a choice. Most agencies bolt an AI function on later and describe it as a capability; putting it in the founding line-up asks to be read as part of the operating model instead. Whether it is one or the other will show in what the firm actually builds.