Forbes India - The Startup Fridays Podcast

Our latest guest on Startup Fridays is an incredibly prolific entrepreneur and VC investor. Bala Parthasarathy is the co-founder and CEO of Mwyn Tech, better known for MoneyTap, the company’s app-based lending platform with millions of users. The company is now well onto its next phase of growth as a digital bank under the name Freo. He'd previously co-founded Snapfish, photo management and ecomme...

Our guest this week is Suresh V Shankar, founder and CEO of Crayon Data, a nine-year old big data and AI company, out of Singapore and Chennai. Shankar is a second-time entrepreneur, and an evangelist of big data, analytics and digital personalisation. His first venture, RedPill Analytics was acquired by IBM. With more than 35 years in the industry, he likes to say he’s been around long enough to...

Our guest this week is Ashutosh Garg, co-founder and CEO of eightfold.ai , a company with a sophisticated talent intelligence platform used by some of the world’s biggest companies. Garg is also the co-author of a book titled, “What’s Next for You - The Eightfold Path To Transforming The Way We Hire And Manage Talent”. Previously, he co-founded another successful Silicon Valley company, called Blo...

Our Guest today is Anshuman Bapna, co-founder and CEO of Terra.do , an online school that offers an immersive deep dive into all the important aspects of climate change with the purpose of equipping professionals to take action and become part of the climate change solution. Before starting Terra.do last year, Bapna has had multiple startups to his credit, the first of which he started while he wa...

Vaibhav Agrawal started out as a medical doctor, but found an entrepreneurial streak in himself, and founded Prima Clinics, a chain of outpatient clinics in New Delhi. His second startup, called Comfort, was in California, and also in the area of healthcare. He has an MBA from Stanford University, and for the last five years, he has been a partner at Lightspeed India Partners — one of the top VC f...

Ashwini Asokan is co-founder and CEO of Mad Street Den, a computer vision and artificial intelligence technologies company, based in Chennai in India, and Redwood City, California, in the US. In 2017, Mad Street Den was recognised among the 50 most promising startups in the world by Bloomberg. Ashwini has also written about her experience in making Mad Street Den a company where half the staff are...

Our guest today is Amit Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Yulu Bikes, an innovative urban mobility company trying to solve the problems of access, availability and affordability for the masses. Gupta previously co-founded ad-tech company InMobi, and AnalyticsWorks, a business intelligence venture. He is also an active angel investor in multiple startups in India and the US. He has an executive MBA from...

Canada-based Ray Newal was instrumental in setting up the Indian unit of Techstars, a respected global startup accelerator, headquartered in the US, in Bengaluru. Newal was actively involved in mentoring its first few cohorts, before returning to Canada. He remains an advisor to the company and also serves on the advisory boards of Canadian VC firms Brightspark Ventures and StandUp Ventures. Today...

A chance discussion over a breakfast meeting with friends about poor customer experience thanks to bad internet connection became the germ for an idea that would become a successful conversational AI-driven platform. Raghu Ravinutala, co-founder and CEO of yellow.ai , the company that built that platform, now has over 700 large companies using its technologies, this includes some of the world’s bi...

Our guest today is Richa Singh, co-founder, chief conceptualiser and CEO of yourDOST. For over six years now, Richa has been working to simply make it easier for people to talk to someone who can not only listen with empathy, but also offer professional help wherever needed. And she has built his into a growing network that now touches millions of employees of corporate businesses t...

Samir Bodas, co-founder and CEO of Icertis, is an exceptional technologist, with three decades in the industry. He took his venture, in the specialised field of contract lifecycle management, from India to the US and turned it into a corporation that was recently valued at $2.8 billion. In the process, he has successfully straddled the world of entrepreneurship and the demands of corporate leaders...

The founding partner of pi Ventures in Bengaluru, is a technology veteran himself, having worked at Motorola and Sling Media among others. He has built products and also contributed to the MPEG 4 standards. In the last 5 years, Singhal has backed multiple AI-led startups in India with his first fund. He is now raising his second, with a target of $100 million, to expand pi Ventures’ portfolio into...

Chakravarthy and Mehta, our guests this week, are co-founders of ePlane Company. The duo aspire to build all-electric flying taxis for passengers, as well as cargo transport aircraft small enough for last-mile delivery. They are currently testing a scaled-down prototype and expect to have their first cargo plane ready as early as next year. The entrepreneurs have also recently raised $1 million in...

Vivek Goyal, our guest this week, is the cofounder and CEO of MobilizAR Technologies, popularly known as PlayShifu. He and his cofounder Dinesh Advani build award-winning STEM toys that combine physical touch-and-feel toys with digital apps that can convert children’s screen time into an interactive and learning activity. PlayShifu has also recently raised its series B round of funding to expand o...

Mehta, our guest this Friday is a venture capital investor who has been backing startups in India for over a decade, with the aim of encouraging founders who might go on to disrupt large businesses with new products, services and business models. He has invested in more than 150 startups in everything from software-as-a-service to education, fintech and artificial intelligence. He has hopes that I...

Our guest this week is Vinay Bagri, who started his fintech company in 2015 to combine his two decades of experience as a banker with the best of mobile internet technologies to provide a modern banking experience to individuals and businesses alike. Today, Niyo has over two million individual customers and more than 6,000 corporate customers. The company is backed by investors including Tencent,...

Kahn, our guest this Friday, is an American who has settled in India. He is a venture capital investor who has been backing agri-tech startups in India for the last decade, with the aim of encouraging founders who want to go beyond incremental innovations in the sector. To that end, he has invested in everything from internet-of-things based startups to satellite companies to insurers for farmers....

Ravichandran, our guest this Friday, and his cricket buddy SPM Moin, are building rockets that will put small satellites into low-earth orbits. One interesting aspect about their work is that they are combining rockets technology with 3D printing. They can now 3D print an entire rocket engine as one single block in 72 hours. Srinath has a degree in electrical engineering, but spent a big chun...

Singhal is building Aluminium and Graphene based fuel cells that address problems like range of the batteries and battery life and degradation. And he says the raw materials can be almost fully extracted back and recycled back into new fuel cells. He expects his solutions can be sold overseas also, and will be especially useful for long-haul transportation. Log9 is also already commercialising a s...

Ahmed and his co-founder Kshitij Khandelwal are ready to launch their first satellite into a low-earth orbit to grab hyper-spectral images of the planet. In a few years, they expect to have a constellation of 30 earth observation satellites covering the globe. They already have customers lined up and funding from marquee investors including Lightspeed and Techstars. Ahmed eventually wants to ventu...

Singhal and his co-founders Govind Soni and Vimal Sagar Tiwari have built one of India’s most popular crypto currency exchanges, with millions of users. The entrepreneur talks about why he is optimistic about the growing interest in crypto in India even though there is some uncertainty about what the government will eventually decide about private digital currencies

Vishesh Rajaram, and his fellow partner Arjun Rao started their VC firm in 2017 to back entrepreneurs attempting to solve difficult technological problems in multiple areas—from computer vision aided guidance for industrial robotic arms to electric planes and 3D printed rockets to put small satellites in space. They have invested in 18 startups and are now ready for their second fund to invest in...