Atul Satija

Satija grew up in Chandigarh in a lower-middle-class household; his father was a government employee and his mother a schoolteacher. He holds a BTech from a National Institute of Technology and an MBA from the Indian School of Business.

Satija worked for about seventeen years in technology and telecommunications businesses, including assignments at Infosys, Adobe and Samsung. At Google he was head of business development for India and head of the mobile business for Japan and the Asia-Pacific region. He then spent five years at InMobi, latterly as chief revenue officer, responsible for global sales, marketing, business development and operations as the company grew from a start-up into a mobile advertising business of global scale.

He founded The/Nudge Foundation in 2015, which was renamed The/Nudge Institute in 2022. Its first programme, Gurukul, was a 90-day residential course giving young people from poor backgrounds life, learning and job skills. The organisation later added an economic inclusion programme, launched in 2018, which uses a graduation approach with cash and care support for households in extreme poverty across several states, and Asha Kiran, begun in 2020, which supports migrant workers and rural women through livestock-based livelihoods.

Its Centre for Social Innovation, formerly NCore, runs an incubator and accelerator for non-profits, prize competitions for technology-based solutions, and the Indian Administrative Fellowship, an 18-month programme pairing corporate leaders with government officials. After meeting Venkat Krishnan, the founder of the donation platform GiveIndia, Satija became its chief executive and GiveIndia became a sister organisation of The/Nudge.[2][3][4][5]