VCCircle

Ambarish has global work experience in business strategy, marketing, technology and organizational effectiveness. Ambarish developed Go-to-market strategies for Fortune 10 Technology and insurance companies of the world while working for McKinsey & Company in US. Earlier he worked at Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics, Germany as researcher in the area of Artificial Intelligence and as a Systems developer in US. He is passionate about the strategic application of technology as a tool for total business transformation.

Ambarish graduated from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur with degree in Computer Science in 2000. He received his MBA from Carnegie Mellon University, USA in 2007.

An entrepreneur, a tech enthusiast, a never-say-die attitude, Aneesh Reddy is the co-founder and CEO of Capillary Technologies. Aneesh believes in putting cutting edge technology to its best use to deliver measurable business value for his clients.

At Capillary, his expertise spans over key functions such as business development across the country and managing the company’s business interest in India. He has also been instrumental in expanding the business to England and currently heads the Capillary subsidiary in there.

Atul is a well-respected leader in the SaaS world, having just moved back to India after 20 years in the US.  He has been with salesforce.com for over 4 years and has been part of the amazing growth story of the Cloud, as salesforce.com has grown from 40,000 customers to over 100,000 and revenues have tripled to ~$2.5 billion since the time that he joined the company.  Under Atul's leadership, salesforce.com defined what it means to support customers in the cloud and is seen as a pioneer in this space.  In his new role, Atul is now leading the effort to bring Salesforce and the social enterprise to the India region as well as actively engaged in building Alliances with partners across multiple markets in APAC.  Prior to salesforce.com, Atul has had extensive leadership experience with companies such as SAP Business Objects, ACS, and Paccar and thus has a strong grasp of the contrast between on-premise and SaaS and keen insights into what it takes to be successful on the Cloud.

Dhiraj has been working in the field of Digital Imaging since 1991. Prior to founding Canvera Dhiraj was Director of Product Development and Operations at Naehas a Silicon Valley startup building technologies for multi-channel personalized marketing applications. Prior to Naehas Dhiraj was Engineering Manager/MTS at Shutterfly (NASDAQ:SFLY), a US based online Digital Photography company, where he was part of the core R&D team that developed their imaging and workflow automation technologies. Dhiraj has a PhD in EE from Purdue where his research was focused on algorithms for desktop printers. His PhD research was sponsored by HP's Imaging & Printing Group. Dhiraj has an MS in EE from Washington State University and B.Tech in EE from IIT Bombay. Dhiraj has numerous patents and publications to his name in the field of Digital Imaging.

Girish founded Freshdesk in 2010. Prior to Freshdesk, Girish was Vice-President of Product Management at ZOHO Corporation. He has over 13 years of experience in making and marketing best-in-class enterprise IT management products. Very passionate about customer service, usability and making products that give the biggest bang for the buck, Girish has easily been the Product Manager with the happiest set of customers.

Lakshmanan (Lux) Narayan is the CEO and Co-Founder of Unmetric Inc, the Social Media Benchmarking company. The company's SaaS platform is is a pioneer in the social media competitive intelligence space, and is fast carving & owning a niche for itself in providing unique analytics across social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube & Pinterest.

Unmetric has operations in the US & India, and Lux divides his time between these geographies. He is also a volunteer and co-founder at ShareMyCake.org (a section 25 company), and a director at Vembu Technologies.

A graduate of IIT Madras & IIM Calcutta, the greater part of his 17 years of work experience have been at the helm of startups. The remaining years encompassed various roles in advertising, media and entertainment - at Lintas and Initiative Media, Middle East, and a brief stint at the erstwhile Amitabh Bachchan Corporation.

Mr. Manik Arora is Founder & Managing Director of IDG Ventures India, an India focused technology venture capital fund based in Bangalore. IDG Ventures manages US$6 Billion globally and has a portfolio of over 200 companies built over 15 years across Asia and North America.

Manik currently serves on the Boards of Vserv Digital, Brainbees (Firstcry.com), Ozone Media and Sourcebits Technologies. Previously, he invested in Travelguru (sold to Travelocity) and Patni Computer Systems (IPO).
Manik was previously a venture capitalist at Battery Ventures in Silicon Valley, a technology entrepreneur at i-DNS in Singapore, an operating executive at American Express in New York and a strategy consultant at The Boston Consulting Group in India and Singapore.

He is a Kauffman Fellow and holds a Bachelors degree from Swarthmore College and an MBA from the Sloan School at MIT.

Mukul Kumar co-founded PubMatic and leads the company's engineering team. Before PubMatic, Mukul was the Director of Engineering at PANTA Systems, a high-performance computing startup. Prior to PANTA, he was Director of Engineering at Veritas India, joining the company as the 13th employee. He helped Veritas India grow to over 2,000 employees. Mukul has filed for 14 patents in systems software, storage software, and application software. He proudly proclaims his love for π and ability to recite it to 60 digits.

Mukul is a graduate of IIT Kharagpur with a degree in Electrical Engineering and resides in Pune, India.

Mukund Mohan founded BuzzGain (Sold to Meltwater in 2009). He has founded and successfully sold 3 startups before BuzzGain.  He was head of product marketinMukundg for Mercury responsible for the direction and customer success of the company’s Application Management solutions. Prior to Mercury, he was Vice President of Operations at Conslient, a software company focused on process automation. In this role, he managed a team of sales and services personnel and was responsible for customer success. In addition, he held product and management positions at Ariba and Asera and began his career at Cisco Systems.

Mukund served on the board of advisors of iConclude, Platform46, Smart Crowds and is on the board of Semantic Defense and Kinetic Brains.

Mukund studied at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County pursuing a master’s degree in computer science and holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering and computer science from the University of Mysore in India.

Nitin Padmawar, Co founder and CTO at Reasoning Global eApplications Pvt  Ltd. is a serial entrepreneur who has co-founded a software services venture before co-founding successful B2B2C SaaS based digital commerce startup Reasoning Global eApplications with group of like minded mates.

Nitin is excited about technology and its application to business problems. At Reasoning Nitin has been instrumental in architecting and designing a very scalable & reliable cloud based platform which forms the heart of Reasoning’s flagship SaaS product, MartJack and powers its catalog and demand aggregation platform martjack exchange. His roles have typically comprised of Product management & Technology leadership, including module planning, development to strategizing the entry into new business line through product route.

In his first venture, Technobahn InfoTech, Nitin was instrumental in developing core solutions for various enterprise clients and his experience is broadly varied across mobile, Internet & enterprise applications.

Deriving from his broad experience, Nitin has been working on technologies that leverage cloud computing, social media, the Internet and mobile platforms to build the next generation digital commerce solutions at Reasoning.

Samudra has a history of contributions in designing products, interfaces, engaging interactivity, and effective instruction. An alumnus of the acclaimed Industrial Design Center at IIT - Mumbai, his past includes significant work in the world of design and communications, before he channeled his creative energies into addressing instructional processes that help people learn.

Prior to founding LearningMate, Sam (as he is better known) helped establish and manage the custom eLearning content development operation for Aptech Limited (later known as Mentorix). Besides this, Samudra brings a wealth of knowledge in management, processes, delivery, and implementation of eLearning as well as valuable relationships across the world.

Based in Mumbai, Sam is responsible for guiding the vision of the company. In addition he personally manages LearningMate's strategy planning and investor relations.

Sharad Sharma is the Chair of NASSCOM Product Forum and an active member of Indian Angel Network. His 25 yrs experience involves a turnaround (of VERITAS India ops), a startup (now part of Cisco), and an intrapreneurial setup of AT&T/Lucent’s R&D in India. He has held a number of senior executive positions with leading technology companies. Most recently he was a SVP at Yahoo! and CEO of India R&D. He is passionate about cloud computing and its potential to create software product winners out of India.

Sharat is responsible for all business development, sales, and marketing efforts at MobStac.

Prior to founding the company, Sharat spent over 3 years doing investment banking at Merrill Lynch in New York, where he worked in both the Corporate Finance and Leveraged Finance groups. In this role, Sharat assisted clients in deriving customized solutions to the corporate finance issues they were facing. His work spanned a diverse set of industries, including but not limited to, financial services, healthcare, retail, technology, etc., and also included executing multi-billion dollar financing and merger and acquisition transactions.

Prior to that, Sharat spent a summer on a venture capital initiative at Duke University working with entrepreneurs crafting business plans. Sharat has a Masters in Engineering Management (MEM) from Duke University, and a B. Tech in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras.

Sharat is also very passionate about politics and public governance. From October, 2008 to May, 2009 Sharat was on a break working at Janaagraha as the Head of Marketing and Communications for the very popular Jaago Re One Billion Votes Campaign, India's largest grassroots movement for voter registration to date.

At Accel India, Shekhar focuses on Internet, mobile, and technology-enabled businesses. Shekhar has been an active angel investor in Bangalore since 2007 and has advised several early stage startups in and around Bangalore. Before joining Accel, Shekhar headed VeriSign India as Country Manager.

Shekhar serves on the boards of FreshDesk, HotelLogix, Mobstac and SureWaves.

Before VeriSign India, Shekhar worked as Vice President at VeriSign in Mountain View in their mobile division. Before VeriSign, Shekhar worked closely with Philippe Kahn in creating LightSurf Technologies, which was acquired by VeriSign in 2005. Before LightSurf, Shekhar worked as part of the management team at Starfish Software, which was acquired by Motorola in 1998. Shekhar started his career at Texas Instruments in Bangalore and then worked for Wipro Technologies. Post his studies, he worked at Qwest (U.S. West Technologies) in Boulder, Colorado.

Sriram V Iyer, Co-Founder, United Mobile Apps (UMA) is also the Technology Editor of YourStory.in. His interests are Mobile / Wireless technologies (esp LTE) , Mobile Operating Systems and Cloud Computing.  He has a special liking for dynamic programming languages (esp Python) and dabbles in Ruby, F# and Lisp occasionally.

Sriram was part of the team that had a vision of integrating Mobile and the Cloud as early as 2009. UMA was one of the early adopters of Azure, with their solution (www.usyncworld.com) going live in 2010. It was a unique blend of Open Source Technologies (Glassfish, Java EE) on Microsoft Azure.

Sriram is also the author of ‘Embedded Realtime Systems Programming’ for Tata McGrawHill and has a couple of patents (pending) in the domain of Wireless Schedulability, Dynamic Programming languages.

Founder & CEO, is focused on building a dynamic organization dedicated to innovation and excellence for customers and end users. That means finding the best people possible to join the team and getting out of their way!

Valerie most recently served as Head – Strategic Initiatives at mChek, a mobile payments startup in Bangalore, and before that she worked at eBay in California. Valerie earned both her Bachelors and Masters degrees from Stanford University.

Shailendra is a Managing Director with Sequoia Capital India. Prior to joining the firm in 2006, Shailendra was a strategy consultant at Bain & Company in New York. Earlier, Shailendra was an entrepreneur in the digital media industry. Shailendra received an MBA with Distinction from Harvard Business School and a B.Tech in Chemical Engineering from IIT Mumbai. Shailendra is also a Kauffman Fellow.