Forbes India - Tech Conversations

In this conversation, from September, Sanjay Swamy, managing partner and co-founder at Prime Venture Partners and Anshul Rai, co-founder and CEO of Happay, which was acquired by CRED, talk about the central role of exits in the venture capital-driven startup model. The VC investor and the entrepreneur break down everything from the timing of an exit to what not being able to provide a good exit to...

In this episode, from September, Niraj Rajmohan and Narayan Subramaniam, co-founders of Ultraviolette Automotive, and Vishesh Rajaram, managing partner at Speciale Invest, talk about the importance of strong local R&D for the long-term growth of the EV sector in India. They also talk about how developing Ultraviolette’s first electric motorcycle, the F77, which has since been launched in the m...

In this conversation, from August, Saravana Kumar, founder and CEO of Kovai.co, recalled how he bootstrapped his company from one customer—a casino in Hong Kong—to thousands, including Shell, Boeing and Ikea, in a niche software area, growing to a $10 million ARR SaaS venture out of London and Coimbatore. Saravana—who went from a distance-learning MCA degree to a successful software entrepreneur—s...

In this episode, we go back to a conversation from August with Ankita Thakur, co-founder and chief data officer at GeoIQ. Ankita spoke about how her fascination with data brought out the idea that became her first successful startup. She also explained the connection between the availability of rich location data and real-world business outcomes for customers—made easy through the APIs that GeoIQ...

In this episode, we go back to a conversation from July, with Karthik Rajaram, VP and country head for India and ASEAN at Freshworks. At the time, Freshworks had been recently empanelled as a vendor on India’s Government e-Marketplace and Karthik spoke about the public sector opportunity. He also spoke about his reasons for joining Freshworks, and his mandate to add many more customers in this mar...

In this episode, we go back to a conversation with Neha Singh and Abhishek Goyal, co-founders of Tracxn Technologies, from July 2022, when they were preparing to take their company public. The company was listed on the stock exchanges in Mumbai in October. In this conversation, Neha and Abhishek spoke about how they teamed up, why they decided to start Tracxn, back in 2013, and their plans ahead....

In this episode, we go back to a conversation from March 2022, with Manish Dabkara, CMD and CEO of EKI Energy Services, India’s only listed carbon credits company. EKI Energy, a BSE SME listed company shot to a billion dollars in market value within nine months of going public in April 2021. The company’s market value has not been spared by this year’s downturn in the global economy. In this conve...

In this episode, we go back to a conversation with Francisco D'Souza, co-founder and former CEO of Cognizant Technology Solutions, from February this year. In 2020, after more than 25 years at Cognizant, Francisco stepped back from the IT services giant he helped found and build. Since then he’s been working on his next innings, as co-founder and managing partner at RECOGNIZE, a $1.3 billion priva...

In this episode, Avinash Godkhindi, CEO and MD at Zaggle, a fintech SaaS company, talks about why expense management solutions will see strong demand in India soon. He also talks about how, over the last 10 years, keeping Zaggle focused on enterprise customers has paid off. The company has grown from offering employee benefits all the way to vendor management, with customers including some of the...

In this episode, Bharani Subramaniam, a head of technology in India at Thoughtworks, a well-known software and consulting company that has a strong presence in India, talks about being a lifelong techie. Heading into the year ahead, he also talks about what businesses should know about getting better returns on cloud investments, what CEOs should know about the shifting sands of cyber security, an...

In this episode, Sashank Rishyasringa and Gaurav Hinduja, co-founders of axio, a well-known fintech venture in the lending space, talk about how they found their niche with what they call checkout finance. With some six million consumers using their product and adding hundreds of thousands more every month, they also talk about the opportunity ahead to build on top of the checkout finance product,...

In this episode, Brian Stafford, CEO of Diligent Corp., talks about how the modern corporate board’s mandate has become much more complex and different from the traditional mandate of helping the chief executive to maximise shareholder value. Board members, often outlast CEOs and must take a longer-term view of their companies’ futures, he says. Technology, such as the software offered by Diligent...

In this episode, Rucha Nanavati, chief information officer at Mahindra Group, and Karthik Rajaram, VP and country head for India and ASEAN at Freshworks, talk about the modern CIO as a business stakeholder, with technology playing a more critical role even in traditional brick and mortar businesses. They also talk about deploying FreshService, the IT service management product from Freshworks, at...

In this episode, Razorpay’s co-founder and MD Shashank Kumar and CTO and Head of Engineering Murali Brahmadesam, talk about what they are doing to preserve the Bengaluru fintech company’s engineering-first culture as it grows bigger. With a 1,000-person engineering team, Shashank talks about how it was time to find a CTO who would help the company in its next phase of growth and give him the space...

In this episode, D Venkatesh, founder and CEO of Lentra AI, talks about how his company is living up to its name, from the idea of transforming lending. With customers such as HDFC Bank and Aditya Birla Finance, four-year-old Lentra is today one of the fastest-growing fintech SaaS companies in India. After a recent $60 million funding round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, SIG and Citi Ventures,...

In this episode, Akash Gupta and Abhinav Roy, co-founders of Clean Electric, talk about plans for their electric battery technologies company, after $2.2 million in funding from investors including Kalaari Capital and Climate Angels. Akash and Abhinav also talk about their dream of building a strong engineering-based company that can turn out high-quality hardware products made in India that can f...

In this episode, Rafi Shaik, founder and chief scientific officer of Carbanio, a B2B marketplace for chemicals, talks about the opportunity to modernise and streamline the supply chain in this segment, a $300 billion industry in India alone, by dragging it into the era of the internet. Rafi, a scientist-turned-entrepreneur, raised $1.3 million in seed funding in February, and he is in talks to rai...

In this episode, 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 enables teams...

In this episode, Ayyappan Rajagopal, CEO of Cleartrip, talks about the next phase of his career at Flipkart group, where, in the past, he has been instrumental in growing various ecommerce categories, from fashion at Myntra to smartphones and furniture at Flipkart. Ayyappan, who took over as chief executive of Cleartrip a little over a year ago, has a clear plan to transform the business from a bo...

In this episode, Prakash Govindan, co-founder and COO of Gradiant, a water treatment technologies company, talks about how his love for building products took him from academic research to being a first-time entrepreneur. Ten years on, Gradiant has evolved into a mid-sized leader in managing water treatment for global customers including semiconductor companies and pharmaceuticals giants. Gradiant...

In this episode, Ashwini Asokan, co-founder and CEO of Mad Street Den, talks about how businesses are frustrated with tall claims about AI. Mad Street Den is a Silicon Valley and Chennai-based software company offering AI products that help customers organise and “stitch together” their data and extract useful information. On the other hand, there is an “uproar of demand” for products that offer t...

In this episode, Vishal Prakash Shah, co-founder and CEO at Synersoft Technologies, talks about how his venture went from “miserable failure” to 10,000 installations with paying customers among India’s MSMEs – offering an IT-in-a-box product fine-tuned for the needs of small enterprises. He also talks about “cloud-flation” and why small enterprises in India are still wary of the cloud, although Sy...

In this episode, James C Foster, founder and CEO of ZeroFox, outlines the growing opportunity in cybersecurity outside the enterprise firewall, as social media has changed how businesses interact with consumers. Foster recently visited Bengaluru, where his company has just added enough office space for 300 employees. The US-based company, with customers including NASA, Nike, Uber, United, Costco a...

In this episode, Vikram Gupta and Yatin Kavishwar, co-founders of Awidit Systems, talk about how they are developing Awiros, which is best described as an operating system on top of which multiple computer vision and video analytics applications can be brought together. Vikram, who brings the science and tech experience, and Yatin, a veteran tech salesman, are also building a marketplace for such...

In this episode, Ram Sukumar, co-founder and CEO at Chennai’s Indium Software, talks about the opportunities for the digital engineering services company – in not only traditional IT outsourcing – sometimes called ‘horizon 1’ – but also in ‘horizon 2’ areas including modern software product engineering, low-code and gaming. Ram also talks about how he’s been reorganising the company to sharpen the...