Ananda Krishnan was born in 1938 in Brickfields, Kuala Lumpur to Tamil parents, who were of Sri Lankan origin. He studied at Vivekananda Tamil School in Brickfields and furthered his studies at Victoria Institution, Kuala Lumpur. Later, as a Colombo Plan scholar, he attended the University of Melbourne, Australia for his B.A. (Honours) degree majoring in political science. During that time he boarded in the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn. Following that, Krishnan obtained a Masters in Business Administration from Harvard Business School, graduating in 1964.

In 2003 Krishnan’s Usaha Tegas launched the Harapan Nusantara education fund. Since 2004 the fund has sponsored 100 students a year to attend special programs at local private universities that collaborate with foreign universities. In the same year the company also started the Yu Cai Education Foundation with a grant of $6.6 million to help ethnic Chinese groups.

In 2006 Ananda Krishnan’s media company Astro introduced its scholarship program, promising to devote an annual RM2 million to support promising Malaysian undergraduate and graduate students studying media and broadcasting.

In 2008 he contributed to the opening of the Montfort Girls Centre to help orphaned and underprivileged girls develop their vocational skills.

In 2010 Krishnan was featured on the Forbes list of 48 Heroes of Philanthropy.

In January 2015 Ananda Krishnan and the Usaha Tegas Group launched the Yu Cai Foundation (YCF). YCF provides student scholarships for Mandarin-based schools and grants to educational institutions which promote the study of vernacular languages, especially Mandarin and English.