About & Team — MESADEN

“What is actually happening, what are we trying to achieve, and what is really standing in the way?”

For more than a decade, that question followed Denesam Gunasekaran into every room he was asked into, by C-suite leaders, boards and founders facing a decision too important to delegate.

That work led him to build Lex Regal first. But he kept seeing the same gap: organisations experience a problem as a whole; professional services approach it in parts. So he built MESADEN to close it.

Outcome over method. It is the reason MESADEN exists.

Office of the Director

Where MESADEN’s work takes shape before it moves outward.

Problems are framed, research gathered, positions tested and decisions prepared here, then followed until they are carried out.

Emerging perspective

Keshvi Kothari

Strategic Associate, Office of the Director

Proximity to the decision. Fidelity to its reasoning.

Keshvi Kothari is a Strategic Associate in the Office of the Director, working at close quarters with the Director across MESADEN’s priorities, its research and its ongoing work.

Her role reflects a conviction the firm holds close: that emerging judgement is most valuable where it meets earned experience. Rather than keeping young professionals at a distance from consequential work, MESADEN brings them to its centre, where they observe discernment in practice, are expected to question rather than merely execute, and take on more as their own judgement proves itself.

Keshvi brings to that setting an unflinching pursuit of what is true, a fidelity to evidence that does not bend to convenience, and the grit to keep searching once a serviceable answer has already appeared. Across courtrooms, commercial practices and a public institution, she learned to read a dispute from the point where it fractures; a family enterprise in institutional travel, with further ties to hospitality, taught her how an enterprise is kept alive.

She is developing towards the Chief of Staff function, and already extends her rigour outwards, helping others sharpen the questions they ask. Beyond the firm’s own mandates, she brings that same rigour to a global initiative for animals and other living beings.

Emerging perspective

Angelina Thomas

Strategic and Legal Initiatives Associate, Office of the Director

Understand the place, then the problem.

Angelina Thomas works in the Office of the Director on problems that rarely sit inside one discipline or jurisdiction, the kind that keep returning to a question she has carried across different places: why do people and businesses facing similar problems so often arrive at different ways of solving them?

Her sense of how the world fits together began before her legal training did. Raised between Yemen, Dubai and Bengaluru, she grew up on her father’s stories from years at sea in the merchant navy: how different places think, operate and deal with one another. It became a lasting interest in how nations and institutions interact, through trade, disputes and diplomacy.

Her legal training gave that instinct a practical outlet. Work across India and the UAE put her inside company formation itself, structuring new entities through the DIFC and DIAC in Dubai, with incorporation and compliance work spanning the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Law was the vantage point; what she was watching was how enterprises, and the countries around them, actually operate.

At MESADEN, that view meets a growing interest in entrepreneurship and in building businesses that work across borders: reading what is local to a place alongside what connects it to everywhere else.

Advisory council

Earned judgement, where the work meets the world.

Senior Advisor

Earned judgement

Bindu S. Chettur

Strategic Partner, UAE · India–UAE Strategy and Cross-Border Affairs

The India–UAE corridor, understood from inside it.

Bindu S. Chettur advises MESADEN on India–UAE strategy, risk and cross-border affairs, bringing more than three decades of experience across India, the UAE and the wider Middle East, built on legal practice, institutional leadership and company building.

She founded Chanakyatse Consultancy, which combines legal, management and financial advice for entrepreneurs and corporates, and has been a Senior Associate at Mohamed Salman Advocates & Legal Consultants in Dubai since 2000. She is a registered Wills Draftsman with the DIFC Courts Wills Service, with experience across arbitration, acquisitions, real estate, construction, employment and the enforcement of foreign judgments.

Her institutional record is distinctive. She has been empanelled counsel to the Indian Consulate in Dubai since 2002, and served as President of the Indian Business & Professional Council, Dubai, the representative body of Indian business under Dubai Chambers. In 2025, Gulf Business named her among its Top 100 Indians.

At MESADEN, she contributes senior judgement and relationships; the firm contributes research, risk analysis, technology and execution. Together they support founders, family businesses and companies moving between India and the UAE, in both directions.

Three decades across India, the UAE and the Middle East
Former President, Indian Business & Professional Council, Dubai
Empanelled counsel, Indian Consulate in Dubai, since 2002
Registered Wills Draftsman, DIFC Courts
Gulf Business Top 100 Indians, 2025

Dr Jasleen Kaur Cheema

Advisor, Healthcare & Health-Tech · US Development Partner

Where medicine meets the systems around it.

Dr Jasleen Kaur Cheema advises MESADEN on healthcare, health-tech and pharma, and leads the firm’s development in the United States from Silicon Valley.

Trained in medicine in India and now based in San Jose, California, she brings a clinician’s understanding of how care is actually delivered to questions that rarely stay clinical for long: how health-tech products earn the trust of doctors and regulators, how pharma and life-sciences businesses stay compliant across markets, and where AI can safely enter clinical and operational work as the rules around it are still being written.

As MESADEN’s US development partner, she connects the firm with healthcare and technology businesses in the United States, and brings their hardest questions back to a team built to solve them.

Jackson Lobo

Advisor, Talent, Brands & Digital Identity

Where talent, brands and audiences meet.

Jackson Lobo advises MESADEN on the talent and brand economy. Over more than a decade inside influencer, talent and brand houses, he has worked with leading film and public figures on partnerships with major corporations.

He brings an operator’s view of how that world actually works: how partnerships are made, where they strain, and what talent and brands need protected as likeness, content and digital identity become assets in their own right. At MESADEN, that view shapes the firm’s work for everyone in the ecosystem, from creators and their managers to the brands that work with them.

Risk Intelligence

Uncertainty, read early and weighed in numbers.

An IRM-trained team that locates exposure, tests the numbers and prices the risk before a decision is taken, for MESADEN and for the clients it serves.

Rakshitha Bhattiprolu

Risk & Regulatory Intelligence Analyst, Risk Intelligence

Every financial decision carries a risk. She names it first.

Institute of Risk Management (UK) Enterprise Risk Management

Rakshitha Bhattiprolu is a Risk & Regulatory Intelligence Analyst in MESADEN’s Risk Intelligence team, trained in enterprise risk management with the Institute of Risk Management (UK). She brings that lens to the firm’s own pricing and financial strategy, and to the exposures its clients carry.

Finance drew her early, through the way financial decisions quietly shape how a business runs; the IRM added the habit of locating uncertainty and thinking through what could fail before it does. An MSc Finance programme with the University of Liverpool now carries that into budgeting, audit and financial analysis.

She came to MESADEN through Lex Regal, and still tests herself in case competitions. Encouraged by her sister to say plainly what she wants, she treats each new path, a possible venture in baking among them, as part of a longer plan.

B.Com (Hons)
Budgeting, audit and financial analysis
MSc Finance programme, University of Liverpool
Firm pricing and financial strategy

K. S. Samyuktha

Risk & Financial Intelligence Analyst, Risk Intelligence

Risk is a constraint to design around, not a reason to stop.

Institute of Risk Management (UK) Enterprise Risk Management

K. S. Samyuktha is a Risk & Financial Intelligence Analyst in MESADEN’s Risk Intelligence team, trained in enterprise risk management with the Institute of Risk Management (UK). Her work spans risk dashboards, regulatory tracking and counterparty assessments, along with the market intelligence that shapes the firm’s own direction.

She comes from a family of teachers and carries its regard for learning into how she builds. Outside the firm she designs products, and the two habits meet in one conviction: risk belongs inside the problem being solved, as something to design around, never a reason to stop.

The first to join MESADEN’s team, she is now bringing that designer’s instinct into the firm’s problem-solving methods.

BBA, Business Analytics
Risk dashboards and counterparty assessments
MBA Finance programme, Christ University
Market intelligence

Board

Governance, held close to the work.

Arnold Thomas

Non-Executive Director

The long view, and the question of how every commitment holds.

Arnold Thomas is a Non-Executive Director of MESADEN. A practising advocate with more than twelve years across contracts, drafting, negotiation and litigation, he heads Lex Regal, an independent law firm.

He has stood alongside the Director since the first venture they built together, and brings to MESADEN’s board a long view and a steady discipline: asking how every commitment will hold when it is tested. He holds no executive role at MESADEN.