Forbes India - The Startup Fridays Podcast

Our guest today is Vinay B Nair, Founder and CEO of TIFIN, which is a fintech venture in the US that provides technology and expertise to business clients to apply AI to personalise their financial products and services to their end customers or consumers. Vinay has a chemical engineering degree, and a doctorate in finance and economics. He founded TIFIN in 2018. Previously he has been a hedge fun...

Our guest today is Sunil Thomas, co-founder and executive chairman of CleverTap, which provides a software platform that a large number of brands around the world use to better engage with their customers. Sunil started with a computer science degree, and in a career that spans more than 30 years now, he has held several top jobs in tech and business. He and two of his friends—Anand Jain and Sures...

Our guest today is Sandeep Farias, founder and managing partner at Elevar Equity, an early-stage VC firm that backs entrepreneurs who are solving large problems for the low and middle-income communities in India and Latin America. In this episode, Sandeep talks about the ‘Elevar Method’ for identifying ideas that could become enduring businesses with significant societal impact

Our guest today is Madan Padaki, founder and CEO of 1Bridge, which provides a host of services in small towns and villages, linking brands and businesses with India’s rural economy, and creating micro-entrepreneurs from among the rural youth. In this episode, Madan, who is an entrepreneur and angel investor, talks about how rural youth have the same aspirations for a better life as anyone else, an...

Satya started life in a village, some 80km north of Jaipur city, in Rajasthan. He earned a chartered accountant’s qualification and attended an advanced management programme at Harvard Business School. In a career that spans more than 30 years, he rose to become a top executive in private banking, first at ICICI Bank, in Singapore, and then at Barclays, where he was chief executive of private bank...

Our guest today is Pratap Raju, founding partner of Climate Collective, an organisation that is building a platform to accelerate climate tech startups in India, by catalysing stronger linkages between the startups and large corporate buyers and users of their solutions. He is also the founding partner of a VC fund, Climate Seeds Fund, providing seed-stage funding to climate startups. Climate...

Our guest today is Rajiv Srivatsa, partner and investor at Antler India. Rajiv’s career spans going from software engineer at Infosys to product developer at Yahoo! to entrepreneur as co-founder of Urban Ladder to VC investor. In this episode, he talks about how each stage was the realisation of his overarching desire to always mentor people and take a deep passionate interest in helping them deve...

Our guest today is Rohan Verma, CEO and executive director at MapmyIndia, a Mumbai-listed company in the areas of digital mapping, geospatial technologies and automotive mobility technologies. In this episode, Rohan talks about why he is optimistic that a serious tech product ecosystem will emerge in India over the next five years. He also hopes that entrepreneurs with foresight will rise and make...

Our guest today is Nagaraja Prakasam, an angel investor and startup mentor. Before he turned investor full time, Naga, as everyone knows him, had a successful career in the software industry. Over the years, he’s turned his focus to impact investment and it remains his passion. He is also a bit of a globetrotter and has visited 26 countries. He is an advisor and mentor at various startup incubator...

Our guest today is Sateesh Andra, managing director at Endiya Partners, a VC firm that backs early-stage IP-led startups. Before Endiya, he was a partner at Ventureast and DFJ. Before turning to VC, Sateesh was a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, as founder and CEO of Euclid, in the IT management software space. Sateesh was also a top-ranked table tennis player representing Andhra Pradesh.  (00:46...

Our guest today is Anish Achuthan, co-founder and CEO of Open Financial Technologies, a neobank with more than two million SMEs as customers, making it one of the biggest fintech companies in this sector worldwide. Open has marquee investors backing it, including Google, Tiger Global and Temasek and the company is building a very strong portfolio of technologies for banking and financial services

Our guest today is Anirudh Damani, founder and managing partner of Artha Venture Fund. After a degree in Economics and Business Administration, he spent several years in the energy industry in the US. He returned to India in 2013 and started Artha Energy Resources, an advisory firm in Mumbai, and Artha India Ventures, his family office, through which he backed several noteworthy startups, before s...

Our guest today is Ajit Isaac, Founder and Executive Chairman of Quess Corp. Ajit’s career started just as India’s economic liberalisation was beginning. Earlier in his career, Ajit was a British Chevening scholar. He had a successful corporate career before he turned entrepreneur, and built two large HR companies, including Quess. In today’s conversation, Ajit talks about the next phase of Quess’...

Our guest today is entrepreneur-turned VC investor, Vaibhav Domkundwar, founder and CEO of Better Capital, an early-stage VC firm. At Better Capital, Vaibhav has had phenomenal success in identifying a large number of promising startups very early and backing them. Today, collectively, his portfolio companies are worth over $5 billion

Our guest today is Sangeeta Bavi, Director, Startup Ecosystem, Microsoft India. Sangeeta started at Wipro more than 20 years ago. She then had a long stint at Nokia where she led projects, products, as well developer outreach. At Microsoft today, she is helping startups from the idea stage, all the way to becoming established businesses. She is also an active volunteer community builder as part of...

Our guest today is Ezhilarasan ‘Ez’ Natarajan, founder and CEO of CoreStack, which helps enterprise customers find the best way into the cloud. Prior to CoreStack, he held leadership, strategy and business ownership roles at Capgemini Group and Mindtree. He has been part of the Microsoft Azure Business group building Public Azure services for the world, in China and Australia

Our guest today is Manav Garg, founder and CEO of Eka Software Solutions. Eka today provides a comprehensive cloud platform for commodities and energy trading. When Manav started Eka, there was no playbook for software products companies out of India. Today, he is one of the central figures in India’s software-as-a-service startup ecosystem. He helped start SaaSBoomi, and this year, a venture fund...

Our guest today is Rahul Saxena, co-founder and CTO of AiDash. Saxena is a serial entrepreneur and has previously co-founded Quiklo, a fintech startup in Bengaluru, and allMemoirs, a social commerce and product discovery venture. He was also an entrepreneur-in-residence at the VC firm Accel. He has a degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi

Our guest today is Shruti Kapoor, co-founder and CEO of Wingman, which offers an AI-product to help sales people do better on the fly, among other things. Previously, Kapoor worked at Payoneer, an American payments technology company, where she was part of the founding team and helped establish the company’s India operations. She has a BSc in Life Sciences from National University of Singapore, an...

Our guest today is Jahangir Mohammed, founder and CEO of Twin Health, based in San Francisco, with a centre in Chennai. The company offers a digital-twin based health service combining AI and machine learning, and the latest in medical science to help people reverse diseases like diabetes. Previously, Mohammed has built multiple tech businesses, including Jasper, an IoT technology company that was...

Our guest today is Atul Shinghal, founder and CEO of Scripbox, a company that has played an important role in making it easy for people to invest in mutual funds in India. And Scripbox is now evolving into a broader wealth management platform. Shinghal is also co-founder of Probe Information Services, which provides financial information on companies in India. He has a degree in naval architecture...

Our guest today is Parag Naik, co-founder and CEO of Saankhya Labs, in Bengaluru. Saankhya is an award-winning semiconductor design company that has a range of products and solutions in its portfolio today for both terrestrial and satellite communications. Parag went has a degree in computer science. He is a serial entrepreneur, and Saankhya Labs is his third successful venture. The company has pa...

Our guest this Friday was Brendan Rogers, founding partner at 2am VC, a venture capital firm in the US, which focuses on investing in Gen Z entrepreneurs in India. 2am VC, which Rogers co-founded with Hershel Mehta, has already made several investments in Indian startups in sectors including fintech and health care. This is not his first entrepreneurial stint. Rogers co-founded Wag! Labs, an on-de...

Our guest today is Amit Anand, founding partner at Jungle Ventures in Singapore. In previous stints, Amit has held executive positions in sales and business development roles at Progress Software, STT Communications-backed and Singapore-based Elipva, and at Tata Infotech Ltd, in India. In 2006, Anand turned entrepreneur when he founded Ettamina Studios, a Singapore-India based animation studio. He...

Our guest today is Sharat Potharaju, co-founder and CEO of MobStac, a company he started over 12 years ago along with Ravi Pratap Madimsetty. Previously, he worked in investment banking at companies including Merril Lynch and Fieldstone Private Capital. Potharaju has a degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and a master’s degree in technology management and...