
Lord Karan Bilimoria, CBE
Karan Bilimoria, Lord Bilimoria of Chelsea, is the founder of Cobra Beer, a household brand in the United Kingdom (UK) and one of the most awarded beers in the world. He is the founding chairman of the UK India Business Council, a lieutenant to His Majesty’s Commission of Lieutenancy for the City of London, and a deputy lieutenant of Greater London. He served as a senior nonexecutive director of the Booker Group (now Tesco PLC) from 2007 to 2016. Bilimoria is one of the first two visiting entrepreneurs at the University of Cambridge and a founding member of the prime minister of India’s Global Advisory Council.
In 2006, Bilimoria was appointed as the Lord Bilimoria of Chelsea, becoming the first Zoroastrian Parsi to sit in the House of Lords. He is a former chancellor of Thames Valley University (now the University of West London) and was the youngest university chancellor at the time of his appointment. From July 2014 to July 2024, he served as the seventh chancellor of the University of Birmingham, becoming the first Indian-born chancellor of a Russell Group university in Great Britain. He is also the president of the UK Council for International Student Affairs.
Bilimoria is an honorary life fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, an honorary fellow of Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge, and served as the chair of the Advisory Board of the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, from 2015 to 2020, after which he was appointed an Honorary Ambassador. Since 2017, Lord Bilimoria has been a Bynum Tudor Fellow at Kellogg College, University of Oxford, and is a visiting fellow at the University of Oxford, based at the Centre for Corporate Reputation at the Saïd Business School, an Honorary Fellow at the London Business School (LBS) and the recipient of an Honorary Fellowship by Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow.
Bilimoria has received 12 honorary doctorates, including from Heriot-Watt, Brunel, Staffordshire, London Metropolitan, Cranfield, Westminster, Exeter, Birmingham, the University of West London, York St. John, the University of East Anglia, and the University of Petroleum and Energy Studies. He is a fellow of the Chartered Association of Business Schools and a patron of the Small Business Charter. Additionally, he serves as an honorary group captain in 601 Squadron of the Royal Air Force.
He served as president of the Confederation of British Industry from 2020 to 2022. In November 2022, he was appointed chairman of the International Chamber of Commerce UK, effective January 2025. In 2008, Bilimoria was awarded the Pravasi Bharti Samman by the president of India. He qualified as a chartered accountant with Ernst & Young through the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and holds a law degree from Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge. He is also an alumnus of the Cranfield School of Management, London Business School, and Harvard Business School through executive education programs. Currently, he is pursuing a Business Doctorate at the Cambridge Judge Business School.
Bilimoria is a cochair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for International Students and cochair of the India APPG. In June 2022, he was appointed a trustee of Policy Exchange. In 2025, he became a cochair of the Digital Transformation Taskforce at the B20 South Africa, patron of the FW de Klerk Foundation, and joined the advisory council for the Milken Institute’s Investing in Europe’s Competitiveness Initiative.