London Business School Lands £15M Gift From Alumni Couple

Anjuli and Raj Rao’s donation to London Business School creates an endowed chair, a scholarship fund and LBS’s first-ever endowed research fund

London Business School has received a £15 million ($20 million) gift from Masters in Finance alumni Anjuli and Raj Rao – one of the largest donations in the school’s history – to fund scholarships, a named academic chair and a new endowed research fund.

The gift, announced Monday (June 8), will establish three named initiatives: the Anjuli and Raj Rao Endowed Scholarship for Excellence, supporting standout students in the MiF and MBA programs; the Anjuli and Raj Rao Endowed Chair, the 12th named chair in the school’s history; and the Anjuli and Raj Rao Endowed Fund for Research Excellence, the first endowed research fund LBS has ever created.

The school will also rename its Plowden Building in the couple’s honor, and the Raos will join LBS’s Forever Forward Campaign Leadership Board as vice chairs.

THE DONORS

Anjuli, who graduated from the MiF program in 1999, built a career in investment banking at Citigroup before turning to philanthropy and managing the family office. Raj, a 1998 MiF graduate and member of LBS’s Governing Body, co-founded Global Infrastructure Partners, now part of BlackRock, where he serves as president and chief operating officer and sits on the firm’s Global Executive Committee.

“LBS has been central to our journey,” the Raos said in a statement, adding that they hoped the scholarship would open the same doors for future students that LBS once opened for them.

LBS Dean Sergei Guriev called the gift a combination of flagship scholarship, endowed chair and pioneering research fund that would strengthen the school’s ability to recruit top students, attract faculty and produce research with real-world impact.

IN CONTEXT

The Rao gift lands at a moment of active fundraising competition among top business schools on both sides of the Atlantic. At LBS itself, it follows a £25 million anonymous gift announced last September that established the school’s first-ever endowed research institute and pushed its Forever Forward campaign past £115 million – and a £25 million donation from INEOS founder Jim Ratcliffe in 2016 that secured the school’s Sussex Place home for 125 years.

Across the Atlantic, the numbers get considerably larger. David Booth’s $300 million gift to Chicago’s Booth School of Business in 2008 remains the largest single gift to a business school ever, followed by Stephen Ross’s $250 million gift to Michigan’s Ross School of Business over several years. Nor is big-dollar philanthropy the exclusive province of elite schools: Just last week, Cleveland Browns owners Dee and Jimmy Haslam committed $130 million to the University of Tennessee, with $100 million of that earmarked for the Haslam College of Business – the largest gift in the university’s history. Last September, Wharton announced a $60 million commitment from the Jacobs family, making it the Ivy League B-school’s largest-ever single contribution.

At £15 million, the Rao gift is described in the LBS press release as the fourth-largest in the school’s history – and, by the school’s own accounting, among the most structurally ambitious, combining a scholarship fund, a named chair and the school’s first endowed research fund in a single donation.

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