The personal side
Sudarshan is happily married to Shweta Surana — his partner in life, and an equal partner in every part of it: across the family’s businesses, and just as much at home, where the two of them have raised their family and built their life together. Long before Cary, Shweta had built an accomplished career of her own back home in India, where she worked as a model: she won the Miss Nagpur title and walked the runway at a fashion show in New York. Today she is hands-on in the family’s ventures day to day, from Pickles and Play and CRS Marble and Granite to the family’s real estate and other investments, and much of what the family has built reflects her judgment and hard work as much as his. She is equally active in the community’s social circles, and she believes deeply in charity and giving back — a conviction the two of them share, and one that runs through everything from The Surana Foundation to this practice. A fitness professional herself, she is very active in the local fitness community — and the reason Sudarshan stays fit and young. Sudarshan counts himself grateful and blessed to be married to her. They live in Cary with their two amazing dogs, Snoopy and Skylee.
Together, Sudarshan and Shweta have raised their two children, Sanah and Shrey, through school and college, and helped care for aging parents, while building careers, businesses and a financial life over decades. That shared experience is why they understand the questions many people bring here: How do we raise our children well? How do we care for our parents? How do we build financial security without losing time with family? Sudarshan is happy to be a sounding board for all of it.
Underneath it is a simple belief: life is about finding balance across its different parts — work, family, health, money, giving back, and continuing to grow as a person. No one part gets to take over the whole. Keeping them in balance, as well as any of us can, is what a good life actually looks like.
The career
Sudarshan Surana has spent more than 25 years across enterprise sales, transformation and technology — structuring and negotiating complex deals across healthcare, retail, banking and insurance. He built Wipro’s US healthcare business from inception to $40M, with earlier experience at Cardinal Health, before joining Accenture.
Today he is a Senior Partner at IBM — and, in parallel, an entrepreneur and investor: a partner in Pickles and Play, the upscale indoor pickleball venue group with four Triangle locations; co-owner of CRS Marble and Granite; and an investor across multifamily and commercial real estate, private equity and venture capital.
Before IBM, at Accenture, where he spent 17 years as a Managing Director, he served as the firm’s Google Cloud Growth Lead for the Americas, leading a $1.6B portfolio. Across his career he has closed $3B+ in total contract value and managed $5B+ in commercial value, growing his business 15% year over year while building $300M+ of new pipeline annually. His work was recognized with the Global Dealmaker of the Year award and, twice, Accenture’s corporate-wide Thought Leadership Awards.
The second education
Formally, Sudarshan holds an MBA in Finance and is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA). The less formal education mattered just as much: building a business line from zero, sitting across the table in negotiations where the downside was real, evaluating deals where due diligence — not enthusiasm — decided, and learning, sometimes the hard way, how career, money and family decisions compound over decades.
That is the experience he brings into the room: not theory, and not motivation talk, but pattern recognition from deals done, businesses built, and mistakes already paid for.
Giving back is the through-line
In 2009, Sudarshan founded The Surana Foundation, which he chairs — supporting girls’ education in India and more than 1,000 people through health, education and welfare. He was a member of TiE Carolina for 12 years and a mentor there, working with entrepreneurs across the region. At NC State’s Poole College of Management, he is a returning mentor in the ELEVATE program for 2026–27 — and helps recruit new mentors — and was a consulting panelist at Accelerate 2026, speaking to 350–400 students. He is also an Art of Living meditation teacher, a certified advanced meditation and breathwork instructor.
Purpose, Impact & Professional Legacy sits in that same line. The $150 contribution goes directly to a selected nonprofit — the program is a way of giving back twice: the conversation to you, the contribution to a cause.
