Forbes India - The Startup Fridays Podcast

In this episode, Arun Kumar, managing partner at Celesta Capital, talks about why some of the best VC investment opportunities can be found in tough times, as they reveal the most resilient entrepreneurs. Kumar’s career includes leading KPMG India and serving in former US President Barack Obama’s administration. He also talks about embracing change—from leading thousands of colleagues at KPMG to b...

In this episode, Shashank Bijapur, Madhav Bhagat and Rohith Salim talk about how they got to build SpotDraft, which offers a machine learning and AI-based contract lifecycle management platform to legal teams at companies around the world. Founded in 2017, SpotDraft has helped customers process more than a million contracts since the company released its first commercial product. The first-time en...

In this episode, Ganesh Rengaswamy, co-founder and managing partner at Quona Capital, looks back at how he once juggled being a co-founder at Travel Guru and an MBA student at Harvard Business School, and what he would have done differently. Ganesh also talks about Quona’s deep interest in fintech in India and several other markets; and how India’s public digital infrastructure and private startup...

In this episode, Nishchay Ag, co-founder and CEO of Jar, talks about how there is a massive addressable gap in India's middle class with financial products that go beyond the top 30 million that everyone is targeting. Nishchay talks about how he and his friend Misbah Ashraf went from a few WhatsApp group pilots to 10 million users at Jar, in just two years, helping people save money by investi...

In this episode, Bala Srinivasa, managing director at Arkam Ventures, talks about experiences from the firm’s first set of 14 investments so far from their $106 million inaugural fund. Over the last four years, Srinivasa, and his fellow founding partner Rahul Chandra, have backed entrepreneurs who have successfully applied technology to create business innovation in areas including financial servi...

In this episode, Nitin Chhabra, co-founder and CEO of Ace Turtle, a tech-enabled retail business that’s the force behind brands like Lee and Wrangler in India, talks about how the company started out as a SaaS business, selling software for the so-called omnichannel retail. Nitin and co-founder Berry Singh then decided to risk that entire business, convincing their board and investors, to transfor...

In this episode, Suresh Sambandam, founder and CEO of OrangeScape, better known for its product Kissflow, talks about persevering for over 15 years, before he found himself at the right place at the right time offering the right product. Suresh now dreams of making his company at least one of the top three in the world in its category. He also talks about his optimism for India’s cloud software se...

In this episode, Ben Mathias, managing partner at Vertex Ventures for Southeast Asia and India, talks about how he decided to leave behind a nice life in the software industry in Silicon Valley, to come to India as a VC investor. With over three decades in the tech and VC industry combined, Ben talks about what investors did to startups over the last two years, distracting them with too much money...

In this episode, Anjani Bansal, partner and India country head at Global Brain, a Japanese VC firm, talks about why certain opportunities in small-town India are ready for startups to grab and create disruptive innovations. The time is also right for Global Brain to step up its own operations in India, Bansal says, who is looking to grow his team and go beyond the “outbound” investments that the f...

In today’s episode, Rahul Garg, founder and CEO of Moglix, talks about what’s next for the company, which he says is knocking on $600-700 million in revenue. He also talks about his love of solving not just difficult problems, but difficult and large ones, which feeds his entrepreneurial decisions. Aspiring founders must understand this, and prepare for the long haul—from the existential challenge...

In today’s episode, Cody Friesen, founder and CEO of SOURCE Global, talks about his dream of putting to bed one of humanity’s biggest and most urgent problems—the lack of access to clean drinking water for billions around the planet. Friesen is a scientist, engineer, teacher and entrepreneur. In this conversation, he also reflects on his approach to knowledge transfer, the “vibrancy” of India’s st...

Our guest today is Anand Lunia, general partner at IndiaQuotient, a well-known domestic  VC firm that backs entrepreneurs attempting to solve large problems for the Indian market at even “concept stage.” In this episode, Anand talks about how 2021 was an exception, and for the startup ecosystem to come back to its mean, two-thirds of the startups may not be able to raise money, going forward....

Our guest today is Madhu Shalini Iyer, a partner at Rocketship.vc —a Silicon Valley-based fund investing globally. Iyer started out with an engineering degree from the University of Sydney. In her 20-plus years as an engineer, operator and investor, her previous roles include chief data officer at Gojek, which she helped to grow into a business valued at $10 billion at the time, and a founding mem...

Our guest today is Sriram Viswanathan, the founding managing partner at Celesta Capital. In this episode, Sriram talks about his long association with technology and investing in deep tech companies, and Celesta’s strategic focus on the US-India corridor. He also has some experience to share with deep tech entrepreneurs, in areas including product-market fit, growth and scale, the value of strateg...

Our guest today is Sanjay Jain, partner at Bharat Fund and chief innovation officer at CIIE.co. Sanjay, who played a leading role in building Google’s Map Maker, and later was the founding chief product manager at UIDAI, talks about his journey going “from doer to enabler.” With a master’s in computer science from UCLA, and experience as a serial entrepreneur himself, Sanjay also talks about how t...

Our guest today is Srikanth Velamakanni, cofounder, group CEO, and vice chairman of Fractal Analytics, which as the name suggests, provides deep analytical insights to customers in a range of verticals, including retail, financial services, and healthcare. Srikanth co-founded Fractal in 2000, and it turned unicorn earlier this year. The real aspiration, Srikanth says, is to have the company outlas...

Our guest today is Grace Sai, cofounder and CEO of Unravel Carbon, a company that is making it easier for businesses to track and reduce their carbon emissions, with a focus on Scope 3 emissions and Asia. Grace is a serial entrepreneur and also a VC investor as a Kauffman Fellow. She has an MBA from the University of Oxford (where she was a Skoll Scholar) and a Masters in Change from INSEAD. She s...

Our guest today is Ajeet Singh, cofounder and executive chairman of ThoughtSpot. In 2009, he co-founded Nutanix with Dheeraj Pandey and Mohit Aron. Today, it is a listed company in the US with $1.2 billion in ARR. In 2012, he co-founded ThoughtSpot with Amit Prakash. The company is seen as a leader in enterprise data analytics. At its last funding round, announced in November 2021, ThoughtSpot was...

Our guest today is Smita Deorah, co-founder and Co-CEO of Boulevard Leadership, better known for its edtech business LEAD. Smita and her husband Sumeet Mehta started LEAD in 2012. Today the company reaches a million students in 3500 schools in more than 400 cities in India. It is now a unicorn, privately valued at more than a billion dollars, by investors including WestBridge, Elevar Equity and GS...

Our guest today is Pawan Kumar Chandana, co-founder and CEO of Skyroot Aerospace. Pawan and Naga Bharath Daka, both former ISRO engineers, started Skyroot in 2018 and over the last four years they—and their team of 200—have reached a point where their next big step will be the space flight of their first rocket, Vikram I. Earlier this week, they also made headlines for the biggest funding round at...

Our guest today is Ashutosh Sharma, head of investments in India for Prosus, one of the world’s biggest technology investors. In this episode, Ashutosh, who has led Prosus’s investments in India for some six years, talks about how an emerging trend in the country’s startup ecosystem is led by entrepreneurs “building in India for India.” That is reassuring, even amid a slowdown, because it augurs w...

Our guest today is Bobby Balachandran, founder, president, and CEO of Exterro Inc., which provides a sophisticated tech platform for global corporations to better manage their governance, risk, and compliance needs. Bobby started out with a BSc in computer science from Government College of Technology in Coimbatore in South India, and an MS in from Portland State University in Portland, Oregon in...

In this episode, Krishna Rangasayee, founder and CEO of SiMa.ai , a 30-year veteran of the semiconductor industry, with more than 25 patents to his name, talks about why the edge is the new battleground. He also delves into the reasons that compelled him to take his first entrepreneurial plunge after a long corporate career, building a cross-border deep tech company and what such ventures need to...

Our guest today is Aditya Prakash, co-founder and CEO of Skidos Labs, an award-winning maker of a children’s educational apps company headquartered in Denmark. Aditya co-founded Skidos in 2013, which today offers a software development kit that can infuse math education for children into any game. Before Skidos, after an MBA from the Indian School of Business Hyderabad and The Tuck School of Busin...

Our guest today is Rajesh Jain, founder and group MD of Netcore Cloud. In the world of entrepreneurship, he is best known for selling one of his earliest ventures, IndiaWorld Communications, to Sify—then Satyam Infoway—for $115 million, in 1999, one of the biggest internet deals of the time in Asia. Jain founded Netcore in 1997, and has bootstrapped it to a profitable $100 million ARR SaaS company...