A Catalyst for Change – Continuously Driving Business Growth and Transformation
Lakshmi Natarajan is a high-octane Indian American commercial executive and investor with two decades of experience catalyzing revenue growth for Fortune 500 industry powerhouses. A transformational visionary and culture cultivator, Lakshmi has traveled to over 60 countries, honing her leadership skills and bridging divides to bring teams together under a unified vision. She has been instrumental in leading strategic initiatives across multiple industries.
Her career is defined by strategic vision, empowering leadership, and an unwavering commitment to building inclusive, high-performing teams—consistently delivering impactful results across diverse organizations.
Lakshmi’s differentiator lies in her people-centric approach: she leads with empathy, inclusivity, and a steadfast commitment to elevating others to success. Her career is characterized by initiatives that align teams, nurture client relationships, and generate sustainable growth for both Fortune 100 companies and agile startups.
Her global leadership and business insights have been featured in Forbes and Medium, earning her spots on MSN’s “Top 10 Influential Entrepreneurs List” and the “Top 100 Innovators & Entrepreneurs Magazine” for 2025.
As the Founder and CEO of Excelador, LLC, Lakshmi draws on decades of leadership experience to provide strategic direction, management consulting, and advisory services to corporate and startup clients.
She also founded Travel Plus Them™, an innovative technology platform that sparks curiosity in students, expands their global awareness, and encourages them to give back to local communities through travel and cultural education.
In her role as General Partner at Erez Capital and Erez Consulting, Lakshmi identifies high-growth AI/tech startups, sources growth capital, and contributes to fund strategy while building the operating model for the broader startup ecosystem. In addition, she supports startups with the executional power from strategy to results through hands-on consulting, fractional leadership, and tailored growth services.
Excelador’s portfolio includes major industry players like Oracle where Lakshmi led a large-scale data migration transformation across continents for Oracle’s largest hospitality client Marriott International. The team built robust executive dashboards, customer experience framework, and unlocked potential revenue by leading sales strategy development for hospitality cloud industry opportunities.
She also served as Fractional Business Development and Change Management Lead at ForeOptics, where she supported their B2B client base in driving profitability, operational consistency, and transformational growth.
For a leading consumer healthcare company, Lakshmi redesigned the annual strategic planning process—streamlining ideation and compressing the go-to-market timeline by six months. This transformation not only accelerated innovation but also established a clear roadmap to achieve the company’s long-range growth forecasts.
