upGrad Promotes Koell Hemdev as General Counsel & Chief Human Resources Officer

uupGrad has elevated Koell Hemdev to General Counsel & Chief Human Resources Officer, consolidating the company's legal and people functions under a single leadership mandate, a structural shift that places governance and human capital strategy within the same office for the first time at the edtech major.

Nine Years Building the Legal Function

Hemdev joined upGrad in 2017 and has spent close to a decade steering its legal function, building it from the ground up during a period of sustained scale-up and multiple high-growth phases for the company. Her tenure has spanned upGrad's evolution into what the company describes as Asia's largest integrated skilling and workforce development platform, growth that brought with it an expanding compliance, contracting, and regulatory footprint across geographies.

An Expanded, Dual Mandate

In her new role, Hemdev will lead upGrad's legal and people agenda in tandem, overseeing both functions as a unified charter rather than as parallel reporting lines. Alongside this expanded remit, she will also spearhead a new initiative aimed at building a stronger community for upGrad's alumni and prospective learners, extending her mandate beyond the traditional boundaries of either function.

The move mirrors a broader pattern playing out across India Inc, where general counsel are increasingly being handed adjacent portfolios — HR, compliance, ESG, and public policy among them — as companies look to house governance and culture-setting functions within a single, trusted leadership seat.

Hemdev on the Convergence

Commenting on the elevation, Hemdev noted that as upGrad has scaled, functions that once operated in silos have needed to speak with a common voice, and that folding HR into her legal remit was a natural extension of that shift, aligning people strategy and governance strategy under one team working from the same playbook.

What the Move Signals

The elevation is a notable data point for new-age lawyers tracking the changing shape of the General Counsel role in India, one that is steadily moving away from a narrow legal-risk mandate toward broader stewardship of organisational governance, culture, and people practices. For law students and young in-house counsel watching the market, appointments like Hemdev's reinforce that longevity, cross-functional fluency, and business partnering are increasingly what separate a General Counsel from a Chief Legal & People Officer in the making.