Forbes India - Tech Conversations

Our guest today is Anirudh Suri, managing partner of India Internet Fund, whose book 'The Great Tech Game' was published recently. In this episode, Suri talks about the strategic imperatives for India in technology, including the importance of identifying the next big waves of tech and for India to find ways to be an early surfer of those waves. (00:39) Introduction to The Daily Tech Conversation...

Our guest today is Srikrishnan Ganesan, co-founder and CEO at Rocketlane—a startup that offers a feature-rich customer onboarding platform, to other fast-growing startups. In this episode, Srikrishnan talks about eliminating the hit-or-miss in customer onboarding. He also talks about the long-term aspirations at Rocketlane, and some takeaways from being a second-time entrepreneur. (00:41) Introduc...

Our guest today is Duncan Emerton, executive director, custom intelligence and analytics, at Informa Pharma Intelligence. Informa is a UK based business intelligence provider and consultancy. In this episode, Duncan explains some of the basics of why biosimilars are a huge opportunity and how Biocon’s deal to purchase the biosimilars unit of its long-term partner Viatris ticks several boxes for th...

Our guest today is Aditya Bhamidipaty, founder and CEO of FirstHive, a customer data platform provider based in Silicon Valley and Bengaluru. In this episode, Aditya talks about how platforms like FirstHive that help enterprises get closer to a holistic view of consumers in the B2C space, will also help those enterprises become much more autonomous. On the business front, he also spoke about putti...

Our guest today is Mohanjit Jolly, partner at Iron Pillar, a relatively young, mid-stage, growth capital provider that has notched up a small roster of very promising tech startups on its portfolio, which is into its second fund now. In this episode, Mohanjit talks about his career, which had multiple interesting transitions, the companies Iron Pillar is backing, and the value that the partners br...

Our guest today is Charles Landry, co-founder and CEO of SpringML, a data analytics and AI services provider focusing on surfacing insights that can lead to business outcomes. In this episode, Charles talks about SpringML’s ability to bring multiple cloud technologies together to build solutions that are tailor-made to the context of a particular business problem. Notes: (00:38) Introduction to Th...

Our guest today is Michael P Morris, co-founder and CEO of Torc, a company that offers a marketplace connecting enterprises and freelance tech talent from around the world. In this episode, Mike talks about how companies are increasingly tapping talent wherever they find it. He also talks about Torc’s plan to expand its operations in India. Notes: (00:39) Introduction to The Daily Tech Conversatio...

Our guest today is Kritika Oberoi, co-founder and CEO at Looppanel, a young startup that wants to ensure that user experience researchers never miss a single piece of important feedback that could go into making their products better. Kritika is also among the first cohort of women founders in Sequoia Capital’s Spark programme. In this episode, she talks about how her own experience led to Looppan...

Our guests today are Ken Murphy, CEO of Tesco, the UK’s biggest grocer and one of the world’s biggest retailers, and Sumit Mitra, CEO of Tesco Business Services and Tesco Bengaluru. Murphy is visiting Tesco India for the first time since taking over as chief executive of the group about 18 months ago. In this conversation, he and Mitra talk about the role of the CEO in managing multiple stakeholde...

Our guest today is Krishnakumar ‘KK’ Natarajan, co-founder of Mindtree and managing partner at Mela Ventures, an early-stage VC firm in Bengaluru that KK has started with fellow Mindtree co-founder Parthasarathy NS. Mela Ventures recently announced its inaugural fund of Rs. 320 crore. In this episode, KK talks about the rare chance at a third innings in his career, in which he wants to spotlight a...

Our guest today is Umesh Sachdev, co-founder and CEO of Uniphore, conversational automation and AI platform provider to some of the biggest companies in the world. In this episode, Umesh talks about the ambition to become the go-to AI layer in any conversation, and the roadmap ahead as an India-born Silicon Valley unicorn with the ambition of hitting a billion dollars in revenue as well. (00:40) I...

Our guest today is Manish Dabkara, CMD and CEO of EKI Energy Services, a BSE SME listed company that shot to a billion dollars in market value within nine months of going public in April 2021. The company helps businesses make their projects more sustainable, and trade their carbon credits. In this conversation, Dabkara talks about the journey so far and opportunities ahead.

Today, our guest is Vishesh Rajaram, managing partner at Speciale Invest, a deep-tech focused early-stage VC firm in Chennai. Vishesh and his friend and VC partner Arjun Rao are among a handful of investors in India backing entrepreneurs who are attempting to bring to market really difficult science and engineering-based products, in areas ranging from space exploration to quantum computing and so...

Our guest today is Pardeep Garg, cofounder of Uravu Labs, a Bangalore startup that has been developing a device to produce water from the air in a renewable manner. In this conversation, Pardeep talks about Uravu’s efforts to make the water they extract truly renewable; and the opportunity to bring renewable water to the trillion-dollar beverages industry. (00:40) Intro to The Daily Tech Conversat...

Our guest today is Geetha Manjunath, founder and CEO of NIRAMAI Health Analytix, who has won multiple awards for her work in computer science and AI applied to healthcare. In this conversation, Geetha talks about plans to take NIRAMAI’s early-stage cancer detection technology to the advanced markets, starting with the UK. She also talks about how the day isn’t far when cancer detection will be pos...

Our guest today is Kausambi Manjita, co-founder and CEO of Mason, an award-winning startup that is making it easier for small retailers around the world to auto-run their online storefronts with its cloud-based no-code software. In today’s conversation, Kausambi talks about the role she envisions for Mason as the online retail space becomes ever more competitive for her customers; and Mason’s top...

Our guest today is Rahul Bhalla, cofounder and CEO of Zenatix, an IoT based energy management solutions provider for small commercial buildings. Zenatix was acquired by the Hero Group in 2018 and is part of its Hero Electronix unit. In this conversation, Bhalla talks about the massive opportunity to take Zenatix’s solutions to the US and European markets.

Our guests today are Simmi Sareen and Shravan Shankar, co-founders of Climake at Unitus Capital. Climake is a growth platform for climate tech startups to access markets and access equity and non-dilutive capital. In this conversation, Simmi and Shravan discuss their second annual report on the state of climate finance in India, in which they note that climate tech financing increased 4X in 2021,...

Our guest today is Tanmai Gopal, co-founder and CEO of Hasura, a Silicon Valley company that is pioneering an open-source and cloud platform that makes it easy for developers to pull together data from multiple sources. Backed by Nexus Venture Partners and Greenoaks, Hasura has just become a unicorn. In this conversation, Gopal talks about plans to make Hasura much more widely available and capabl...

Our guest today is Francisco D’Souza, co-founder and former CEO of Cognizant Technology Solutions. In 2020, after more than 25 years at Cognizant, Francisco stepped back from the IT services giant he helped found and build. He’s now looking ahead at his next innings, as co-founder and managing partner at RECOGNIZE, a US-based private equity firm that will focus on a new generation of deep intellec...

Our guest today is Jani Pasha, co-founder and CEO of Lokal, a three-year-old startup developing a hyper-local social media platform. In this conversation, Jani talks about the takeaways from building Lokal so far, which now covers the four southern Indian states as well as Maharashtra and Gurajat, and figuring out what users value that they’d be willing to pay for.

Our guest today is Ashish Lachhwani, cofounder at Steradian Semiconductors in Bangalore, which is developing chipsets for 4D radar sensing that can go into autonomous vehicles. In this conversation, Ashish talks about Steradian’s partnership with a global tier 1 auto components supplier, an intelligent traffic system in India and university alliances to grow the semiconductor ecosystem in India. (...

Our guest today is Mehul Mohan, founder and CEO of Codedamn, which he started right after engineering college, to turn his passion for coding into a business. Mehul’s interactive approach to teaching coding within a web browser won him early funding from Antler, an international VC firm. Going forward, Mehul wants to build a platform that can automatically suggest jobs to people learning on Codeda...

Our guest today is Vindhya C, who is something of a products management aficionado. In 2019, Vindhya was named product manager of the year by Hacker Noons, an online community of techies. She is a co-founder at OnThatJob, an e-learning startup, and currently works on products at Pexels, a curated photos and videos platform. Vindhya writes a blog on the subject and consults with startups on launchi...

Our guest today is Tyler Sloat, CFO at Freshworks. Tyler is a software industry veteran and, most recently, is credited with being instrumental in Freshworks’s successful IPO. Six months on, Freshworks crossed the $100 million quarterly revenue mark. In this conversation, Tyler looks back at how he got onto a career track that made him a successful CFO. He also talks about Freshworks’s next target...