Simran Foundation

Simran Foundation

The Simran Foundation operates as a private family foundation, co-founded and led by Raj Bhatia alongside family members Seema and Ariana Bhatia. While legally domiciled in Chicago, the foundation's operational center of gravity sits in Naples, Florida, reflecting the family's personal relocation and a growing trend among Midwestern family offices to establish a Southeastern presence. The Bhattias built their capital base through multi-decade careers at Merrill Lynch, where Raj serves as a Managing Director and Ariana as a Private Wealth Manager, giving the foundation's investment stewardship a direct line into institutional-grade portfolio management. Grantmaking concentrates on health and education, with the foundation acting as a major donor to Arogya World, a non-profit focused on non-communicable disease prevention in India. Raj Bhatia also sits on the Chicago regional board of the American India Foundation, a platform that shapes a portion of the foundation's philanthropic pipeline and provides co-donor connectivity. Additional known philanthropic alliances include joint giving with Manjit and Srila Singh — the former CEO of Sony India and his spouse — on initiatives tied to the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA. The foundation does not publicly disclose a deployment target or asset allocation, and no direct investments, fund commitments, or program-related investments have been surfaced in regulatory filings or public announcements. The foundation's staffing remains below public-filing thresholds, with the three named Bhatia family principals forming the core governance layer. It maintains no known investment committee populated by external fiduciaries and has not registered as a 501(c)3 operating foundation, which limits forward-looking visibility into team growth or succession planning. The family holds a residential property on Girard Terrace in Naples listed among its related assets, and the foundation's investment portfolio is understood to be managed out of the Merrill Lynch private-wealth ecosystem in which the principals are embedded. Structurally, the Simran Foundation functions as a tightly held donor-advised vehicle rather than a professionalized endowment, making its governance architecture inseparable from the Bhatia family's personal balance sheet and professional Merrill Lynch relationships. This configuration limits the number of independent touchpoints available to outside co-investors or grant-seekers, but it yields exceptionally high decision velocity for the causes the family chooses to back. The foundation's long-term posture will be defined by whether the next generation transitions toward direct program management or maintains the current model of donor-advised giving through known non-profit partners.