Global Emerging PowerLeaders 2026 · World’s Best Indians
Ashish Nanda, Founder & Managing Director of ACRYO: The Founder Building the Helium Supply Chain Australia Forgot It Needed
Ashish Nanda, Founder & Managing Director of ACRYO, left an executive career in India to start again in Australia. His bet was that a country full of MRI scanners, laboratories and quantum labs would eventually want a supplier who treats helium the way a utility treats water.
At a glance
- Name — Ashish Nanda
- Title — Founder & Managing Director
- Company — ACRYO, Australia
- Business — Helium, cryogenic gases, cryogenic equipment, engineering solutions
- Markets — Australia, New Zealand, Asia-Pacific
- Customers — Hospitals and MRI, universities, research labs, advanced manufacturing, aerospace, LNG, biostorage, quantum technology
- Recognition — Global Emerging PowerLeaders 2026 – World's Best Indians, WCRC Leaders
Almost every hospital MRI scanner in Australia sits on a bath of liquid helium chilled to about minus 269 degrees Celsius. When the helium runs short the magnet warms, the scanner stops, and a radiology department starts cancelling appointments. Nobody thinks about this until it happens. Ashish Nanda has built a company on the assumption that somebody should.
Nanda is the founder and managing director of ACRYO, an Australian firm that imports, stores and delivers helium and cryogenic equipment to hospitals, universities, research institutes, LNG operators and a growing number of quantum computing groups across Australia and New Zealand. It also engineers the hardware around the gas: vacuum-insulated pipelines, super-insulated storage tanks, vaporisers and heat exchangers, sourced from manufacturers overseas and supported by its own technical staff on the ground.
This year WCRC Leaders has named him to Global Emerging PowerLeaders 2026 – World's Best Indians, its recognition of Indian-origin founders and executives building businesses of consequence, in India and abroad.
A commodity with a supply problem
Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe and surprisingly hard to buy. It is recovered as a by-product of natural gas at a small number of fields, mostly in the United States, Qatar, Algeria and Russia, liquefied, and shipped in cryogenic containers that lose a little of their cargo every day in transit. Australia has produced only modest volumes of its own, so a buyer in Melbourne or Auckland sits at the far end of a long and fragile chain. The global shortage of 2022 and 2023 showed how quickly that chain can snap, and who gets served last when it does.
Nanda's reading of the market was that it had been organised around the gas. The customer came second. “The broader innovation is in treating the customer requirement as the starting point rather than the product catalogue,” he says. In practice that meant assembling the whole system himself: international sourcing, liquid helium in flasks from 100 to 1,000 litres, gaseous helium in cylinders, quads and bulk tubes, the dangerous-goods logistics to move all of it, and engineers who understand what a cryostat or a gas chromatograph needs on a Tuesday afternoon when it is not getting it.
“I want customers to know that when they engage ACRYO, they are not simply buying a cylinder, flask, piece of equipment or engineering solution. They are engaging a partner who takes responsibility for understanding their problem.”
Ashish Nanda, Founder & Managing Director, ACRYO
From a corner office in India to a start-up in Australia
Nanda's route here is an unusual one. He spent the first part of his career in engineering, technology and industrial products in India, reaching executive level, before moving to Australia and starting ACRYO from nothing. He talked about that decision on the Future of Australia podcast in April 2024, whose episode notes record growth above 119 per cent and a place among the Australian Financial Review's fastest-growing new companies. Nanda himself spends less time on the growth number than on what the number sits on.
“The significance is not simply the revenue generated,” he says. “It is the infrastructure and relationships created around the business.” He lists them without flourish: supplier relationships with manufacturers abroad, a distribution footprint across Australia and New Zealand, helium in both liquid and gaseous form, an engineering and technical support function, access to specialised manufacturing, and customers spread across healthcare, research, universities, industry and advanced technology.
The thread through his career, as he describes it, is taking technically complex products and turning them into commercially viable solutions. It is a modest way to describe a rare skill. Plenty of engineers understand cryogenics. Far fewer can negotiate with a manufacturer in one hemisphere, a hospital procurement office in another and a dangerous-goods regulator in between, and have all three still returning their calls a decade later.
How he runs it
Ask Nanda to describe his leadership style and he gives you four adjectives: entrepreneurial, relationship-driven, commercially disciplined, execution-focused. Push him and he boils leadership down to vision, people and execution, and his non-negotiables to integrity, accountability, resilience, customer commitment and continuous learning. None of that is unusual on a founder's slide deck. What is more telling is how he handles things going wrong, which in his industry tend to arrive by truck.
A delayed shipment. A flask that has boiled off more product than expected. A change in transport rules for dangerous goods. His method is deliberately unglamorous. Separate the immediate issue from the underlying problem. Establish the facts, including the financial, technical and regulatory consequences. Tell the people affected early. Then fix the cause, and let the symptom take care of itself. “Communicating early rather than allowing uncertainty to grow,” is how he puts it, and anyone who has waited on a helium delivery with a warming magnet will understand the appeal.
On people, he looks for ownership, curiosity and a preference for solving problems over cataloguing them. He hands out responsibility in increments and expects technical staff to understand the commercial logic of what they are building. “A successful leader should build people who can eventually lead without them,” he says. For a founder-run company that is the stated goal and the hardest test, and he knows it.
Where quantum comes in
The most forward-looking part of ACRYO's business is also the coldest. Superconducting quantum computers live inside dilution refrigerators that depend on helium isotopes and serious cryogenic plumbing, and Australia has a research footprint in the field out of proportion to its size, from Sydney to Brisbane. Nanda has steered ACRYO toward that work on purpose. “My interest in quantum technology has developed from understanding where cryogenics and helium are heading rather than simply where they have historically been used,” he says.
His plan for the next three to five years has three parts. Become a major independent helium supplier in Australia and New Zealand, with deeper sourcing and more distribution assets of its own. Move beyond gas supply into cryogenic equipment, infrastructure and integrated solutions. And grow where cryogenics meets emerging technology, with quantum computing at the top of that list. The personal ambition attached to it is to shift, in his words, “from being primarily an operator to becoming a builder of people, systems, partnerships and institutions.”
Why he was chosen
World's Best Indians looks for Indian-origin leaders doing something that matters in the country they have chosen, in a sector where failure has real consequences. Helium qualifies on both counts. It is an input nobody can substitute for medical imaging, much of scientific research and the next generation of computing, and its supply chain is thin. In a market dominated by global gas majors, Nanda has built an independent that competes on speed, customisation and a direct line between customer, supplier and engineer.
His own summary of what ACRYO stands for runs to three short sentences. “Say what we can do. Do what we say. Take responsibility when something does not go according to plan.” Larger companies have been built on less.
In his own words
What have you done differently from the big gas companies?
“Large global organisations have significant scale and resources. ACRYO's advantage is that we can often move faster, customise solutions and develop direct relationships between the customer, supplier and technical team. My role is to connect those capabilities: to understand the customer's requirement, identify the appropriate technology, build the supply chain and deliver the commercial outcome.”
What will leaders in your industry need that they did not need ten years ago?
“Enough technical knowledge to ask the right questions of engineers. An understanding of geopolitical and logistical risk, because critical gases such as helium depend on international sourcing. Customers who expect you to solve problems, not sell them products. Strong safety and compliance discipline. And digital capability, because data, automation and AI will increasingly shape forecasting, logistics and asset management.”
What should ACRYO be in five years?
“A recognised Asia-Pacific platform for helium, cryogenic technology and advanced industrial solutions, rather than simply an Australian distributor. The legacy I want is an organisation that creates opportunities for talented people and contributes to Australia's participation in strategically important technologies.”
PowerFacts
Who is Ashish Nanda?
Ashish Nanda is the Founder and Managing Director of ACRYO, an Australian company that supplies helium, cryogenic gases and cryogenic equipment and provides engineering and technical support to hospitals, universities, research institutions, advanced manufacturers, LNG operators and quantum technology groups across Australia, New Zealand and Asia-Pacific. He built an executive career in India before moving to Australia to start the company. In 2026 WCRC Leaders named him to Global Emerging PowerLeaders 2026 – World's Best Indians.
What does ACRYO do?
ACRYO imports, stores and delivers liquid helium (in flasks from 100 to 1,000 litres) and gaseous helium (in cylinders, quads and bulk tubes), supplies high-purity and ultra-high-purity gases, and engineers cryogenic hardware such as super-insulated storage tanks, vacuum-insulated pipelines, vaporisers and heat exchangers. It works with international manufacturers and provides project engineering, automation and after-sales technical support in the Australian and Asia-Pacific markets.
Why was Ashish Nanda named a Global Emerging PowerLeader 2026 by WCRC Leaders?
WCRC Leaders recognised Ashish Nanda for building an independent helium and cryogenics platform in a market dominated by global gas majors, for extending that platform into quantum technology and research infrastructure, and for a leadership record built on supply continuity, engineering capability and long-term customer relationships. The recognition identifies Indian-origin leaders building businesses of global consequence, from India and from the countries they have made home.
About Global Emerging PowerLeaders 2026 – World's Best Indians
Global Emerging PowerLeaders 2026 – World's Best Indians is a WCRC Leaders recognition of Indian-origin founders, chief executives and senior leaders building businesses of global consequence, from India and from the countries they have made home. Leaders are assessed on the scale and difficulty of what they have built, the strategic importance of their sector, their leadership record and their stated plans for the next five years. Profiles draw on a structured leadership questionnaire completed by each honouree, company disclosures and public sources.
The series
All honourees →