Forbes India - Tech Conversations

Our guests today are Mohamad Faraz, Shivam Prasad, and Vinay Jain, founding partners at Upsparks, a micro VC firm that the entrepreneurs-turned-investors started in 2020. In this conversation, they talk about bootstrapping a communications platform-as-a-service business at a time when there were no playbooks in India and seeing it go through an acquisition and eventually the IPO of the parent busi...

Our guest today is Ritu Verma, cofounder and managing partner at Ankur Capital. Ritu started as a physicist but wanted to be in a world where science is applied to make useful things. In today’s conversation, Ritu talks about realising that ambition as a venture capital investor backing science-led startups and the challenges it presents. By the way, it’s the international day of women and girls i...

Our guest today is Amitava Saha, co-founder and CEO of Xpressbees. He has just taken his company to a billion dollars in valuation and has an IPO on the horizon. In this conversation, Amitava talks about how the logistics industry is becoming much more tech-enabled and a convergence he sees in the operations of his largest customers.

Our guest today is Aayush Ghosh Choudhury, co-founder and CEO at Scrut Automation, a venture focused on automating processes related to governance, risk and compliance. In this conversation, Aayush talks about the innovations that are built into Scrut, and plans ahead, after a recent funding round that saw the young venture get the backing of Endiya Partners and Lightspeed

Our guests today are Pawan Kumar Chandana and Naga Bharath Daka, co-founders of Skyroot Aerospace, who are preparing to flight test their first space rocket by the end of this year. In this conversation, Pawan and Bharath talk about their aspiration to be a launch vehicle provider of choice, with the ability to launch a rocket a day, on demand. (00:39) Intro to The Daily Tech Conversation (00:56)...

Our guest today is Dinesh Varadharajan, vice president and chief product officer at Kissflow, a no-code software pioneer. In this conversation, Varadharajan talks about lessons in perfecting a product, like how less can be more and pitfalls to avoid. He also talks about Kissflow’s next product—a low-code software package with advanced customisation features aimed at the IT team (00:37) Intro to Th...

Our guest today is Achuthanand Tanjore Ravi, co-founder and CEO of Kula, a startup that is aiming to make life easier for recruiters around the world. In this conversation, Achuthanand talks about his own experience dealing with the frustration of finding the right talent quickly in multiple companies that he worked with, and the lessons and customer feedback that has gone into some of the innovat...

Our guest today is Arun Vinayak, co-founder and CEO of Exponent Energy, a battery and charging technologies provider for the electric vehicle market in India. Vinayak, who was part of the founding team and chief product officer at e-scooter maker Ather Energy, started Exponent in 2020 to tackle the problem of quickly getting power into EV batteries from the grid. He has raised about $6 million in...

Our guest today is Arvind Parthiban, co-founder and CEO of SuperOps, a Silicon Valley and Chennai SaaS startup that is automating a bunch of processes for small managed services providers. In this conversation, Arvind talks about co-creating SuperOps with several MSPs, why SaaS startups are increasingly looking at more features from the get-go, and a new round of funding as well—led by Lee Fixel’s...

Our guest today is Srikrishnan Ganesan, who is on his second successful venture, building cloud software products for the enterprise market. In today’s conversation, Srikrishnan talks about some of the lessons he learned from the market that helped him and his co-founders focus on what customers wanted versus what was dear to the entrepreneurs

Our guest today is Keshav R Murugesh, group CEO of WNS, one of India’s largest business process management companies. In this conversation, Keshav talks about how the sector, which started out as cost-saving based business process outsourcing, grew to provide more business value and is now an engine for the digital transformation of some of the world’s biggest companies in areas including financia...

Our guest today is Adith Podhar, founder of Gemba Capital, who is just wrapping up a $10 million fund to invest early in India's next generation of tech-native startups. In today's conversation, Adith talks about going from being a restaurant owner trying to popularise crepes in India to working in private equity, to turning venture capital investor (00:40) Intro to The Daily Tech Conversation (00...

Our guests today are Mike Proulx, VP and research director, and Will McKeon-White, analyst at Forrester—a leading technology strategy advisor to businesses around the world. In this conversation, they point out how Microsoft’s deal to buy Activision Blizzard brings the enterprise cloud software maker out of stealth as a gaming and consumer company, as it takes a dominant position in what is essent...

Our guest today is Manas Fuloria, CEO (custodian of entrepreneurship in the organisation) of Nagarro, an Indian heritage software services company listed in Germany. In this conversation, Manas talks about the 13,000 strong product engineering company’s future and his own entrepreneurial journey—from apparel to education to software.

Our guest today is Chitresh Sharma, a serial entrepreneur, whose latest venture, Refyne, has notched up over 700,000 users and funding of some $106 million in under a year, backed by investors including Tiger Global. In this conversation, Sharma talks about why he thinks Refyne will go on to be the category creator in India for earned wage access.  (00:40) Intro to The Daily Tech Conversation...

Our guest today is Sandipan Mitra, co-founder and CEO of HungerBox, his second venture in the food-tech scene. In this conversation, Mitra talks about persevering through Covid-19, and the long-term vision for the company—which has raised $16.5 million in funding so far—offering both a food tech SaaS platform and a food operations management service. (00:40) Intro to The Daily Tech Conversation (0...

Our guest today is Darshan Bathija, co-founder and CEO of Vauld, a crypto trading exchange and lending startup. In this conversation, Bathija, who comes from a long line of financiers, talks about his disillusionment with traditional finance to make positive change, and his ambition to make loans from the crypto world accessible to anyone who needs them, anywhere on the planet. (00:40) Intro to Th...

Our guest today is Sravanth Aluru, founder and CEO of Avataar, a Silicon Valley and Bengaluru company specialising in AI and computer vision for spatial-visual discovery. Avataar recently announced a $45 million Series B funding round led by Tiger Global. Existing investor Sequoia Capital joined in. In this conversation, Sravanth talks about his effort to develop a platform to deliver a holistic v...

Our guest today is Sunil Gupta, co-founder and CEO of QNu Labs, a five-year-old Chennai startup that has developed commercially ready quantum-safe security products and solutions. In this conversation, Gupta talks about the founders’ vision of building a globally recognised deep tech company from India in the quantum-safe cybersecurity space. (00:40) Introduction to The Daily Tech Conversation (00...

Our guest today is Vinay Ravuri, co-founder and CEO of EdgeQ, a Silicon Valley chip design company working in the area of open cellular networks. EdgeQ’s first commercial product, a 5G base-station-on-a-chip is currently being evaluated by customers. In this conversation, Vinay talks about how 5G takes cellular well beyond smartphones into the internet and large enterprise operations. He also talk...

Our guest today is Gautam Nimmagadda, founder and CEO of Quixy, a no-code software development cloud platform provider in Hyderabad. The concept and even some of the tech has been around from as far back as when Visual Basic programming language was introduced some 30 years ago, Gautam says. Cloud computing, and the needs of a post-pandemic world, are moving the idea from geeks to business users (...

Our guest today is Om Malviya, President, of Tezos India, who is working to popularise the Tezos blockchain in this region. In today’s conversation, Malviya talks about some of Tezos’s unique characteristics, such as how it started with proof-of-stake from the get-go and its self-amending feature. He also spoke of various initiatives to grow the Tezos ecosystem in India. (00:40) Intro to The Daily...

Our guest today is Shrini Viswanath, co-founder at Upstox, one of India’s most popular online brokerages. In this conversation, Shrini talks about the long haul of entrepreneurship — taking the company from a proprietary trading outfit to a rapidly growing consumer-facing tech company used by millions of people to invest in the capital markets. (00:40) Intro to The Daily Tech Conversation (01:00)...

Our guest today is Israeli serial entrepreneur Ofer Bengal, co-founder and CEO of Redis, a data management company in Silicon Valley. In this conversation, Bengal talks about how Redis has grown to be a popular data management platform for customers around the world to make their software applications go faster. Bengal also has some simple advice for Indian entrepreneurs aspiring to build deep eng...

Our guests today are Ritesh Kumar, Sharad Sen Sharma, and Rohan Sen Sharma, co-founders of TranZact, a five-year-old Mumbai startup that has recently raised its series A funding to take its digitalisation platform to more small and medium enterprise customers in India. The next, net-savvy generation of SME entrepreneurs is more willing to try out such solutions than its forebears. Eventually, Tran...