[6] Other notable founding figures were Vikram Sarabhai, Kasturbhai Lalbhai and Kamla Chowdhary.

The physicist Vikram Sarabhai and businessman Kasturbhai Lalbhai, both natives of Ahmedabad, played pivotal roles in setting up the institute.

It was originally set up in 2012 as a research institution, with a grant pool from Government of Gujarat, the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and IIMA.

Other notable alumni are Acharya Prashant,[29] Raghuram Rajan, Arvind Subramanian, Harsha Bhogle, Ajay Banga, Rashmi Bansal, Chetan Bhagat,[30] Ivan Menezes, Deep Kalra, Shikha Sharma, and Gopi Rathod.

[31] Past and present faculty at IIM Ahmedabad include three former Governors of the Reserve Bank of India – C. Rangarajan (1968–1982),[32] former Director I. G. Patel (1996–2001),[33][34] and Y. Venugopal Reddy (current Professor of Practice).

N. R. Narayana Murthy, an Indian tech industrialist and the co-founder of Infosys, got his first job as chief systems programmer at IIM Ahmedabad.

The fund was established at IIM Ahmedabad in June 2020 from an initial corpus of ₹100 Crore provided by 10 founding alumni.

[54] The fund was launched by the Chairperson of IIM Ahmedabad Board of Governors, Kumar Mangalam Birla.