Forbes India - Tech Conversations

In this episode, Vishal Salvi, chief information security officer and head of cyber security practice at Infosys, talks about the increasing complexity of cybersecurity as it often evolves separately from the business-oriented technologies and digital solutions used by enterprises. He explains how security is becoming more “sentient” as the need for real-time context increases with the scale of op...

In this episode, Riya Gangamma, Milind M Mohan, and Pradeep Parthasarathy, co-founders of PupilMesh in Bengaluru, talk about their augmented reality hardware technologies company. The trio started straight out of college, got incubation support at IIMB, won a DRDO programme and got to work on a multi-purpose augmented reality headset. One important application would be as a soldier assistance devi...

In this episode, Pari Natarajan, founder and CEO of the consultancy Zinnov, talks about how India’s tech industry is changing. Once seen as the world’s back office, India’s IT services sector today prides itself as a digital transformation partner to the world’s biggest companies. Pari is among the figures who played an important role in the metamorphosis of India’s tech services industry itself....

In this episode, Nikhil Ramaswamy and Gokul NA, co-founders of CynLr, talk about how far they’ve come, chasing their dream of building a deep-tech hardware engineering company out of India. The duo has been developing a machine learning and computer-vision-based platform to make industrial robotic arms far more versatile than they are today. Their technology has shown early promise and drawn inter...

In this episode, Ashwin Yardi, CEO of Capgemini Technology Services India, talks about how the Covid pandemic validated and boosted the offshore IT outsourcing model. Today it’s more common, even for Capgemini’s European customers to directly engage with engineers in Bengaluru, for example, where the Paris headquartered company has its largest Indian operations, Yardi says. He also talks about how...

In this episode, Manish Jethani, co-founder and CEO of Hevo Data, talks about what drove him to jump back into entrepreneurship, about two years after selling his first venture to what was then Grofers. With about $43 million in funding from investors including Sequoia, Qualgro and Chiratae, Manish and his friend Sourabh Agarwal are close to $10 million in ARR today at their no-code software platf...

In this episode, Rajesh Reddy and Sandesh Paturi, founders of Venwiz, in Bengaluru, talk about how their own experience in figuring out the right vendors for various manufacturing projects validated their idea that there was an opportunity to drag industrial services into the internet age – connecting large buyers with MSME vendors across the country. The duo have raised $8.3 million in Series A f...

In this episode, Debashis Chatterjee, CEO and managing director at LTIMindtree talks about the successful integration of LTI and Mindtree that has resulted in a $3.5 billion IT services enterprise, ready to take on larger rivals for bigger orders, while retaining the characteristics of a smaller, nimbler operator. Chatterjee, widely credited with successfully integrating the two diverse companies,...

In this episode, Rohan Verma, CEO and executive director at CE Info Systems, better known as MapMyIndia, talks about why the company is expanding its hardware products business into the consumer segment, offering sophisticated trackers, ‘navi-tainment’ units and in-helmet, handsfree, smart-navigation assistance. Rohan also talks about how MapMyIndia is becoming an anchor platform for startups to i...

In this episode, Keshav Murugesh, group CEO at WNS, talks about every global CEO is trying to figure out how to tap India’s tech services capabilities. This has also opened up opportunities for companies like WNS, which are coming into their own, as multinational billion-dollar revenue businesses, to manage or even take over their clients’ BPM units. Keshav also talks about three recent acquisitio...

In this episode, Sudhir Singh, CEO and executive director at Coforge, one of India’s well-known mid-cap IT services providers, talks about how the company is set to more than double its annual revenues to a billion dollars, for the current fiscal year, compared with five years ago. He also talks about the culture, which he says is a fancy word for the lived experience of the employees in the compa...

In this episode, Ashish Khushu, chief technology officer at Larsen & Toubro Technology Services, India’s biggest pure-play engineering services provider, talks about the company’s six big bets, and how its engineers are co-innovating with experts from some of the biggest enterprises in the world. LTTS, a Mumbai-listed company, today has about 22,000 employees and revenues of close to a billion...

In this episode, Neil Shah, vice president of research at Counterpoint Research, explains why more people are buying iPhones in India, and why the country has become important to Apple’s strategy. Apple’s latest quarterly numbers, last week, reflected the ongoing problems the tech giant is facing – including production headwinds in China, and consumers becoming circumspect. Amid what CEO Tim Cook...

In this episode, Sateesh Seetharamiah, CEO of EdgeVerve Systems, the products and platforms subsidiary of Infosys, talks about why it is inevitable that everything that can be automated, especially in the enterprise business context, will eventually get automated. Not only that, but the idea of what is automatable itself is changing every day, he points out – just look at the capabilities of ChatG...

In this episode, Gopichand Katragadda talks about turning entrepreneur as the next phase in a career that includes leading the GE John F. Welch Technology Center in India and being CTO of Tata Group. Four years ago, Katragadda co-founded Myelin Foundry with Ganesh Suryanarayanan to develop “global first” AI products for applications at the edge. In this conversation, he talks about the significanc...

In this episode, Satvik K Jagannath, co-founder and CEO of Vitra.ai, talks about his company’s context-based translation technology that is being used by some of India’s biggest companies and startups – from HDFC Bank to Swiggy. Satvik and his school buddy co-founder Akash Nidhi PS have raised about $571,000 in seed funding from investors including 100X.VC and Inflexor Ventures for their Bengaluru...

In this episode, Yamini Bhat and Venkat Malladi, co-founders of Vymo talk about how their 10-year-old venture has found traction for its financial industry focused sales engagement cloud software in the US, Japan, India and five other markets. The company enjoys a net retention rate of 140 percent, they say, putting them among the best SaaS businesses, on that metric – widely used to get a sense o...

In this episode, Shashank Randev, founder and partner at 100X.VC, discusses some of the highlights of a new report that the early-stage venture capital firm has recently published on the outlook for various startup sectors in India – from software as a service to quick-service restaurants or cloud kitchens. Several factors are coming together to make the way ahead a promising one for tech-led vent...

In this episode, Abhay Singh, co-founder and CEO of Eeki Foods, and Vaibhav Domkundwar, founder and CEO of Better Capital, talk about Eeki’s innovations in hydroponics. Abhay co-founded the company with his fellow IIT Bombay graduate Amit Kumar in 2018 after they’d both spent more than a decade in the tech and engineering industries. The entrepreneur and the investor also talk about plans to estab...

In this episode, Kumar Gaurav, head of India and VP of engineering at ThoughtSpot, a data analytics specialist that won recognition for its search-based analytics solution, and Rajesh Dhiman, the company’s senior director for global systems integrators, talk about a plan to invest in some significant expansion in India. The company’s India-based workforce currently accounts for more than a third o...

In this episode, Apoorv Shaligram and Uttam Sen, co-founders of e-Trnl Energy, talk about the critical need for developing cell technologies and cell manufacturing technologies and processes locally, for the long-term sustainability of India’s EV ecosystem. The entrepreneurs have just raised some funding to set up a full-fledged R&D centre in Bengaluru to turn their knowhow into a commercial p...

In this episode, Vishalini Paliwal, founder and CEO at Zipy.ai, talks about how developers often don’t get the full picture when it comes to something that didn’t work with their software code. Paliwal, a serial entrepreneur, has raised $2.8 million in funding from investors including Blume Ventures and Together to develop Zipy, an observability platform. The Silicon Valley-headquartered company,...

In this episode, Kinner Sacchdev, co-founder and CEO of Knorish, talks about how his company is growing, providing a SaaS platform for creators to go from showcasing and offering their knowledge and skills online, to winning paying customers. Knorish itself is sharpening its focus in this direction, to help creators “crack the funnel.” The three-year-old Gurugram company has a team of 40 and $2.4...

In this episode from November, Rohan N Murty, founder and CTO of Soroco, talks about bringing empathy to dealing with the last mile friction that the modern digital enterprise employee faces, by harnessing data. Soroco offers a ‘work graph,’ which in essence, is a map of how teams execute digital work, and it lies at the intersection of people, work, and technology. Once discovered, the work graph...

In this episode, from October, Ankit Jain and Sidhant Pai, co-founders of StepChange, talk about their enterprise software products that help businesses track and reduce their carbon footprints. They help companies attempting to build sustainable products get useful insights into the impact of their products and operations. Ankit and Sidhant are developing StepChange into a SaaS software platform...