Forbes India - Tech Conversations

In this episode, Arjun P Gupta, founder and CEO of Smart Joules in New Delhi, talks about his ambition to play a role in lifting millions of Indians from energy poverty and curtailing carbon emissions in the process. Arjun aspires to build an Indian company that can take on multinational giants such as Honeywell and Siemens in offering a building and energy management automation technology platfor...

In this episode, Mrinal Rai, senior research manager and principal analyst at Information Services Group, a leading technology services outsourcing advisory company, talks about how demand is likely to shape up in the coming quarters for India’s top IT companies. With demand still strong, but caution seeping into actual spending, this is also the time for the vendors to do more, by investing and r...

In this episode, Varun Badhwar, Indian-born serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, talks about his latest venture, Endor Labs, which has just come out of stealth mode, announcing a $25 million seed funding round to commercialise a software product aimed at mitigating the risks involved in borrowing software components from the internet – a growing trend. Investors include Lightspeed Venture Partne...

In this episode, Jayanth Kolla, co-founder and partner at Convergence Catalyst, a tech consultancy in Bangalore, talks about how India, which once lagged other economies in deploying wireless technologies, has begun to take the lead, starting with 4G and 5G wireless. He also talks about his own work over the last decade, that started with consulting in the telecom space, is evolving into helping c...

In this episode, Vijay Prateik, founder and CEO at DeMITasse Energies, and cofounder and COO Megha Rawat, talk about their effort to help mitigate climate change. Prateik has spent over a decade developing a zero-emission power plant and energy storage solution for industrial applications that the duo expects to commercialise over the next two to three years. Incubated at the Indian Institute of M...

In this episode, Saket Dandotia and Vinayak Shrivastav, who co-founded a SaaS company VideoVerse, along with Alok Patil, talk about their AI technologies for all things sports video for enterprise customers. The trio had previously built an interactive video platform, called TOCH, at a company called Vogueme Technologies, founded in 2016. The broader metaverse-driven vision for its future led to T...

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

In this episode, Sanjay Swamy, managing partner and co-founder of Prime Venture Partners, and Anshul Rai, co-founder and CEO of Happay, talk about the central role of exits in the venture capital driven startup growth 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 stakeholders can do to founders. Rai als...

In this episode, Rishabh Agarwal, co-founder and CEO of Peer Robotics, talks about how more attention is being paid today to ‘human-centric’ technologies. Rishabh and his IIT Delhi senior Tanya Raghuvanshi founded the Delhi venture in 2019, and Tanya’s former boss at Interra Systems joined them as the third co-founder the following year. With $2.3 million in recent seed funding, led by Kalaari Cap...

In this episode, Kumar Abhishek and Vivek Kumar Singh, co-founders of Naffa Innovations, a startup better known for its sound-based technologies under the name ToneTag, talk about how their tech is like the ‘Intel inside’ model, today making sound-based transactions possible on a 100 million Android phones. They also talk about a solution that allows feature phone users to make UPI payments using...

In this episode, Taslimarif Saiyed, CEO and director of C-Camp (Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms), in Bengaluru, talks about how Indian biotech startups are ready for their next stage of growth. What’s needed, urgently, is the high-end infrastructure, in close proximity to research environments and the VC and private equity network that can quickly assess these deep science based startu...

In this episode, Pravin Agarwala, co-founder and CEO of BetterPlace Safety Solutions, talks about the factors that are coming together to put the company in hyper-growth mode. Agarwala and his friend Saurabh Tandan started BetterPlace in 2015, with one product, offering background verification. This year, he expects to go well beyond $100 million in revenue by December, even as the company seeks n...

In this episode, Nalin Agarwal, founding partner at Climate Seeds Fund, talks about an annual Startup Week, organised by Climate Collective Foundation, which shares the same founding team as the fund. The event, which will continue through next week, is aimed at bringing together climate tech startups, investors, other stakeholders and aspiring entrepreneurs as well. Agarwal also talks about the n...

In this episode, Avlesh Singh, co-founder and CEO of WebEngage, talks about building a profitable $20 million ARR SaaS company – which he expects will grow 100 percent this fiscal year as well, after 2021-22 – in the competitive space of customer engagement and retention. He also talks about the big changes in the world of marketing and ads that will push the idea of first-party data marketing to...

In this episode, Ankit Alok Bagaria, co-founder of Loopworm, an insect biotech venture in Bengaluru, talks about the opportunity ahead for the business that he started with his fellow IIT Roorkee graduate Abhi Gawri, straight out of college. They aim to tackle food waste and increase the incomes of smallholder farmers. Using multi-species insect biotechnology, Loopworm is upcycling food waste into...

In this episode, Prashant Kumar, co-founder and CEO of Zingbus Technology, talks about how his venture is innovating inter-city bus travel, as road infrastructure improves in India, and technology facilitates data-driven dynamic pricing. He also talks about how Zingbus, backed by investors including Y Combinator, Info Edge Ventures and AdvantEdge Founders, is shifting towards a carbon-neutral futu...

In this episode, Niraj Rajmohan and Narayan Subramaniam, cofounders 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, called F77, which is soon to hit the market, has helped the comp...

In this episode, Neeraj Khandelwal, cofounder and CTO of CoinDCX, one of India’s largest crypto exchange providers, speaks with Forbes India during a three-day event organised by the company that ended August 28. Neeraj speaks about a new mobile app released by the company, called Okto, whose name is inspired by the octopus, in an effort to bring web3 and decentralised apps to the masses. Neeraj a...

In this episode, Simha Sadasiva and Henry Peter, co-founders of Ushur, a customer experience automation company in Silicon Valley and Bengaluru, talk about the unmet need for their solutions in the enterprise space – a need that is helping them to become a “hyper-growth” venture that is within striking distance of becoming a unicorn. Simha also talks about Silicon Valley founders’ pay-it-forward a...

In this episode, Saravana Kumar, founder and CEO of Kovai.co, talks about 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 – now want...

In this episode, Kamalika Bhattacharya, cofounder and CEO of QuoDeck Technologies, talks about how she and her husband and co-founder Arijit Lahiri turned their passion for gaming into a business. She also talks about the pivot from award-winning board games for consumers to a SaaS platform for gamified mobile-based learning that has drawn some of the world’s and India’s biggest brands as customer...

In this episode, Mayank Tiwari, co-founder and CEO of ReshaMandi, a natural fibres venture in Bengaluru, talks about how the company is seeing strong growth, having found its product-market fit, over the last 12 months. He also talks about the ambition to make the company the first destination for any natural fibre product in India and abroad, with complete traceability built on top of a strong di...

In this episode, Shubham Vishvakarma, founder and head of process engineering at Metastable Materials, talks about how he turned his research into a commercial venture to extract valuable metals that could go into India’s electric vehicle battery cells and other applications. Shubham also talks about the R&D centre the company has opened in Bengaluru, and the longer-term plan to go beyond just...

In this episode, Anirudh Gupta and Siddhanth Jayaram, co-founders of Climes, talk about how they wanted to find a way to get people to take climate action, literally with the click of a button. Backed by investors including Sequoia and Kalaari, Anirudh and Siddhanth are integrating their tech with a growing list of brands to show consumers the carbon footprint of their purchases, and also give the...

In this episode, Vivek Goyal, co-founder and CEO of Playshifu, one of India’s best-known AR startups, and Jatin Desai, a founding partner at Inflexor Ventures, a sector-agnostic deep tech VC firm, talk about the world of augmented reality and extended reality. They discuss the current state of affairs, what might drive the industry onto its next phase of growth, including hardware breakthroughs, a...