Forbes India - Tech Conversations

Sravanth Aluru, co-founder and CEO of Avataar.ai, talks about how the world of commerce is changing to embrace 3D and augmented reality. Avataar, a nine-year-old company, was co-founded by Gaurav Baid, who is the chief product officer, and Aluru. They have raised some $55 million from investors, including Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global Management, and built a team of 180 engineers in San Francis...

In this episode, Kamal Karanth, co-founder of Xpheno, a staffing specialist in Bengaluru, talks about the current state of recruitment in the IT services industry in India. Kamal talks about the next wave of global capability centres rising in India and why software job seekers should consider these opportunities. He also talks about some 14,000 vacancies in the Indian startup ecosystem that still...

In this episode, Deepak Vinchhi, co-founder and COO of JuliaHub, an enterprise software company focused on the open-source Julia programming language, talks about the plans at the company after a recent series A1 round of funding from AE Industrial Partners HorizonX, a VC investment platform in collaboration with The Boeing Company. JuliaHub is a commercial venture started by the inventors of Juli...

In this episode, Aneesh Reddy, co-founder and vice chairman at Capillary Technologies in Bengaluru, looks back at his first attempt at cracking the US market and some of the learnings from that experience—10 years ago. He also talks about how Capillary is well on its way to becoming a global leader in the loyalty management solutions space. He expects the company to grow as much as 80 percent this...

Praval Singh, vice president of marketing and customer experience at Zoho, talks about how the company has achieved strong traction with larger enterprise customers. Over the last three years, Zoho grew its mid-market and enterprise segment at 65 percent CAGR. The segment accounts for 50 percent of its annual recurring revenue in India and a third of its entire business, which has more than 90 mil...

In this episode, Pratyush Rai, co-founder of Foyer and Vaibhav Domkundwar, CEO at Better Capital, discuss the generative AI opportunity in India. Pratyush and his two co-founders, Sirsendu Sarkar and Siddhartha Saxena, are developing a Chrome browser extension that they’ve named Merlin, which allows users to tap the power for ChatGPT from whichever website they’re on. The product has found strong...

In this episode, Milind Manoj, co-founder and CEO of Pupilmesh, an augmented reality and deep tech startup in Bengaluru, talks about what he loved about Apple’s new headset, the Vision Pro. Milind talks about how Vision Pro differs from Apple’s other products in that it will probably be very different from what we might find in, say, 2030. In contrast, if you look back at even the first iPhone, it...

In this episode, Narayan Subramaniam and Niraj Rajmohan, co-founders of Ultraviolette, talk about their early choices with the F77, a performance electric motorcycle that’s caught the attention of enthusiasts, young and old. This is part 2 of our conversation, in which the entrepreneurs talk about how sticking to their conviction that building their motorcycle as a premium performance bike was the...

In this episode, Narayan Subramaniam and Niraj Rajmohan, co-founders of Ultraviolette, talk about the evolution of their first product, the F77, a performance electric motorcycle that’s drawn interest from around the world. This is part 1 of our two-part conversation, a simple walkthrough of the Bengaluru company’s first showroom, which the entrepreneurs call their first hangar because they say ev...

In this episode, Dennis Woodside, president of Freshworks, talks about some of the elements of the longer-term plan for Freshworks, including the role that AI will likely play in that. In about ten days, Freshworks founder Girish Mathrubootham is expected to reveal what he’s been up to on the AI front. In this conversation, Dennis talks about the approach to AI that the company is taking. This is...

In this episode, Dennis Woodside, who will soon complete a year since he took on the role of president at Freshworks, tells us about what he’s been up to at the company alongside Girish Mathrubootham. In part one of our conversation, Woodside puts some of Freshworks’ recent numbers in perspective, including turning profitable on a non-GAAP basis for the first three months of this year; and why he...

In this episode, Prakash Govindan, co-founder of Gradiant, a rising star in industrial effluent treatment technologies, returns to this podcast to give us an update on the company’s plans, after a recent $225 million funding round. The investment, led by Centaurus Capital and BoltRock, made the Boston-based company a unicorn, and they are just getting started. Prakash reiterates his ambition to ta...

In this episode, Jayanta Banerjee, group CIO of Tata Steel, talks about how the company built successful IT architectures for multiple acquisitions as it ramped up its operations in India. Jayanta, who previously lead the energy and resources practice at Tata Consultancy Services, talks about the big-picture context in which the digital transformation projects at Tata Steel are being implemented a...

In this episode, Mohamed Ali, vice president of engineering at GE Aerospace, talks about his long tryst with India, where he says “All the action is.” He talks about the globally integrated role GE Aerospace’s 1200 staff in India play in developing the company’s next generation of products, including its RISE technologies—GE’s bid to develop sustainable aviation of the future. He also talks about...

In this episode, Satish HC, executive vice president and co-head of delivery at Infosys, talks about how the company is bringing all its AI experience and capabilities into one comprehensive suite of services, solutions, and platforms—including its generative AI know-how. The company released this recently under the brand name Infosys Topaz. Satish also talks about how Infosys is using these techn...

In this episode, Hemant Charaya, senior vice president for battery cell technology at Log9 Materials, talks about how this Bengaluru venture is attempting something that’s never been done before in India. One factor that’s helped is that “people stuck around”, he says, which helped him build a team of over 40 cell and battery tech specialists. Charaya also attempts some simple descriptions of the...

In this episode, Gaurav Sharma talks about what inspired him to turn software entrepreneur, the first in his family of air force officers, and how he built SaaS Labs, in Noida, into a company that went from bootstrapping profitably in the initial years to a VC funded startup – backed by investors including Sequoia Capital. Gaurav is a serial entrepreneur who started coding at the age of 15. At Saa...

In this episode, Ankit Jain and Sidhant Pai talk about how they arrived at their sharper focus on large enterprise customers for their software platform, StepChange, for climate change-based decision-making. Of particular interest is their ability to help large financial clients model the likely implications and trajectories of investments from a climate impact perspective and form an impact-due-t...

In this episode, Rajen Vagadia, vice president at Qualcomm and president of its India and SAARC operations, explains the semiconductor company’s hugely successful invent-and-licence model, with its chips such as the Snapdragon line being a dominant force in smartphones around the world. They will increasingly be found in connected vehicles as well, he says. Vagadia also gives us an overview of the...

In this episode, Shravan Shankar and Simmi Sareen, co-founders of Climake, a platform for climate tech funding and market access, discuss the latest edition of their flagship annual report – The State of Climate Finance in India 2023. Equity funding for climate tech decreased by 34 percent in 2022 from the previous year, although 2021 numbers were a bit skewed by eight large strategic, IPO, and po...

In this episode, Nitin Jayakrishan and Abhijeet Manohar, co-founders of Pando, a supply chain fulfilment cloud platform provider, talk about plans for their five-year-old venture, after a recent series B funding of $30 million. Investors in the SaaS startup include Nexus Venture Partners, Chiratae, Iron Pillar and Uncorrelated Ventures, the latter two leading the new round. Jayakrishnan and Manoha...

In this episode, Jaspreet Bindra, founder of Tech Whisperer, a consultancy in the UK, and former chief digital officer of Mahindra Group, talks about the rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence and offers five practical tips to make smarter use of tools like ChatGPT. He talks about how AI could be the first technology that could replace humans and how, like nuclear technology, it could br...

In this episode, Alok Nanda, CTO of GE South Asia and CEO of GE’s India Technology Center, talks about the next decade of growth of the aviation and aerospace industry—a lot of which will happen in India. Over more than the last two decades, GE Aerospace’s Indian team has made significant contributions to every important engine platform the company has developed, Nanda says. He also gives his pers...

In this episode, Sean Duca, vice president and regional chief security officer for Asia Pacific and Japan at Palo Alto Networks, one of the world’s largest cybersecurity technologies providers, talks about how while businesses can differ in their products and services, their security needs are similar. As bad actors become more brazen, Sean wants to impress upon everyone that the threats are very...

In this episode, Aniruddha Banerjee and Avra Banerjee, cousins-turned co-founders, talk about how the quality inspection processes at some of the world’s largest manufacturers are ripe for innovative interventions, as much of those remain manual. To that end, they’re building an IoT, computer vision and machine learning-based platform at their five-year-old venture, SwitchOn, with customers such a...