Forbes India - The Startup Fridays Podcast

In this episode, Vishal Gupta, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, talks about his career as a VC investor in India, and gives us an overview of the opportunities he sees on the basis of what Bessemer calls roadmaps that the firm develops for various sectors. In this conversation, recorded on November 26, Gupta also talks about how, from among today’s privately valued unicorns and those that h...

In this episode, Naveen Venkat and Sreelesh Pillai talk about starting another company whose name starts with the letter z. Jokes apart, Venkat, a repeat software entrepreneur, and Pillai, a seasoned marketer, talk about why they think their new startup, Zepic, has something refreshing to offer enterprise customers in the crowded world of marketing automation. In this conversation, which was recor...

In this episode, Naganand Doraswamy and Suryaprakash Konanuru, co-founders Ideaspring Capital, talk about their enthusiasm for India’s early-stage deep tech startups. The two talk about how, while these startups are part of a nascent ecosystem, they are developing products that are sometimes coming to the fore for the first time anywhere. Doraswamy, who’s more involved with the commercial aspects...

In this episode, the founders of Clairco and Sensiable, talk about their vision as one company, as their energy management tech and solutions complement each other – offering customers like Brigade Group a fuller suite of products and services. Aayush Jha, Udayan Banerjee, Ashish Singh and Akshay Davasam, talk about how they can help customers monitor one laptop on one desk or an entire multistore...

In this episode, Parithi Govindaraju, founder and CEO of Okulo Aerospace, gives us a quick update on the solar-electric hybrid long-endurance drones he and his team are developing, for what he describes as “persistent monitoring”. In this conversation, Parithi talks about the importance of such long-endurance UAVs for protecting India’s strategic assets – both civilian and military. He also touche...

In this episode, Abhishek Poddar and Saurabh Arora, founders of Plum Benefits Insurance Brokers, talk about how they are using tech to reimagine employee health benefits and insurance. In this conversation, Abhishek and Saurabh, who started Plum five years ago, also talk about how the journey so far has been one of discovering “a culture of radical transparency” with all stakeholders, which they s...

This episode is the second part of a conversation with Tanuj Bhojwani, head of People+ai, a non-profit effort that's working to find population-scale applications of artificial intelligence that are relevant to large problems in India. In this conversation, Tanuj about how both the development and applications of AI in India will be different from what we see happening in the rich countries. P...

In this episode, Tanuj Bhojwani, head of people+ai, a non-profit effort that’s working to find population-scale applications of artificial intelligence that are relevant to large problems in India, does a quick recounting of how the initiative was seeded. In this conversation, which I hope will be the first of many on AI for India, Bhojwani also gives us a quick overview of the four main objective...

In this episode, Sashank Rishyasringa, and Gaurav Hinduja, co-founders of Axio, a buy-now-pay-later specialist in Bengaluru, talk about how, while a strong regulatory environment is critical in fintech, it can also become an enabler of innovation. Lower cost of money for “new entrants and challengers” with innovative financial products can benefit millions of consumers, which in turn can help Indi...

In this episode, Ashok Jhunjhunwala, institute professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and president of IITM Research Park, Incubation Cell and RTBI, talks about why the next big push is needed now for India to become a nation of deep tech products over the next decade. He also asks that administrators and bureaucrats change their control mindset to allow our scientists, engineers a...

In this episode, Vinod Shankar, founding managing partner at Java Capital in Bangalore, talks about his passion for backing deep tech entrepreneurs. Vinod started out as a software engineer but found himself repeatedly drawn to new experiences. His insatiable thirst for knowledge has taken him from a software startup to leading marketing for a library chain to angel investing to eventually working...

Welcome to a new season of Startup Fridays. In this episode, Karan Mohla, partner at the VC firm B Capital talks about the convergence that he sees beginning to happen, which is bringing different aspects of India’s startup ecosystem to points of inflection. Karan, who’s based in Delhi, has been involved with investments in more than 20 companies including Bounce, FirstCry, HealthifyMe, Xpressbees...

This is part two of a conversation with Kavita Shenoy and Anand Gopal, on their 10-year entrepreneurial roller coaster, building Voiro, an ad-tech SaaS company in Bengaluru. In today’s episode, they talk about how the $750 billion ad landscape is changing, their hopes for Voiro’s future, how building their own company has been life-changing, and why it has them coming back for more every day.

Part one of a conversation with Kavita Shenoy and Anand Gopal, on their 10-year entrepreneurial adventure, building Voiro, an ad-tech SaaS company in Bengaluru. Kavita and Anand are natural conversationalists and story tellers, and produce their own podcast as well. In today’s episode, they talk about how they started Voiro, and then went from consulting and services and an "excel sheet from...

Viral Shah, co-inventor of Julia programming language and co-founder of Julia Hub, an enterprise software startup, talks about this opensource language’s journey that will touch 15 years in the new year. Julia Hub, founded in 2015, today has customers including some of the world’s biggest companies in pharmaceuticals, aerospace, semiconductors, and industrial engineering. With some $43 million in...

In this episode, Amit Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Yulu Bikes, gives us an update on how the electric moped venture will continue its pincode-by-pincode approach to growth. Earlier this year, Yulu added a battery-as-a-service business, called Yuma. Yulu has also entered the OEM business, with Bajaj Auto making the Yulu Wynn, a more stylish version of the Yulu Miracle, that consumers can buy for ab...

In this episode, we chat with Kiran Mysore, a principal at the University of Tokyo Edge Capital, one of Asia’s biggest deep tech VC funds, on the ninth anniversary of his move to Japan, where he found his calling as a deep tech VC investor, leading global investments including India and southeast Asian ventures. We spoke mostly about his experience with the deep tech ecosystem in India thus far an...

Kunal Khattar, founding partner at AdvantEdge, an early-stage VC firm in Delhi, focused on India’s mobility sector, talks about the future of this industry in India and the role that companies ranging from Ather to Tesla could play in it. He also talks about business innovations that could soon make electric vehicles more affordable to the Indian buyer and perhaps even cheaper than the fossil-fuel...

Arun Raghavan, founding partner at Arali Ventures in Bengaluru, talks about how he and his friend Rajiv Raghunandan became VC investors with an operator’s flavour, and the experience that’s helped them invest very early in entrepreneurs across sectors, from fintech and SaaS to deep tech startups. Arun also talks about how India is ready for the next level of sophistication in sectors such as SaaS,...

In this episode, TN Hari, co-founder of Artha School of Entrepreneurship, who’s also a prolific author on building for India, and an angel investor, talks about his learnings from across his career – from being a corporate executive at Tata Steel to diving into startups like TaxiForSure and BigBasket. He talks about problems in India that aren’t necessarily amenable to the hyper-growth model of VC...

In this episode, Shivnath Babu, co-founder and CTO of Unravel Data, talks about the growing importance of data observability and the contributions being made by his venture. Shivnath started his career as a computer science engineer from IIT Madras and then earned his PhD in the area of data platforms at Stanford University. He spent 12 years as an adjunct professor at Duke University before teami...

In this episode, Will Poole, co-founder and managing partner of Capria Ventures, talks about the opportunities and challenges in investing in the global south. Will started his career with a computer science degree 40 years ago and worked at some of the biggest names in tech, including Sun Microsystems and Microsoft, before turning to VC investing. A significant part of that career involves workin...

In this episode, Dev Khare, a partner at Lightspeed, one of the most prominent global early-stage VC firms operating in India, talks about how and why he became a venture capital investor, and what keeps him going today. Dev also talks about how India’s startups are changing, how Lightspeed is different, in his view, and some lessons from his own career, having tasted entrepreneurship firsthand be...

In this episode, Sayandeb Banerjee, co-founder and CEO at TheMathCompany, talks about how his six-year-old venture has grown from strength to strength, building custom analytics solutions for some of the world’s biggest companies. He also talks about how he’s always had an entrepreneurial streak; the advantages of not taking VC money too early; lessons Banerjee, and his co-founders Aditya Kumbakon...

In this episode, Rishi Navani, founder and managing partner at Epiq capital, a growth-stage VC firm, talks about never losing sight of the core idea of venture capital, which is to make substantial returns for his investors. Over the 25 years that he’s been backing ventures, including previously co-founding Matrix Partners India, Navani’s way of doing this is to not spend time on how he can add va...