Forbes India - Tech Conversations

In this episode, Anant Vidur Puri, a partner in India at the VC firm Bessemer Venture Partners, gives us a quick overview of the firm’s latest annual report on India’s software-as-a-service sector. Bessemer projects the sector at $50 billion in annual recurring revenue by 2030. Puri also discusses his view that artificial intelligence software and solutions will likely provide an upside to that nu...

In this episode, Kaushik Mudda talks about how he and his friend Navin Jain turned a problem an opportunity with their award-winning five-axis CNC machine, to build a manufacturing services venture from Bengaluru – Ethereal Machines. Today, backed by Blume Ventures, Peak XV Partners and Steadview Capital, the 10-year-old startup is pioneering what the entrepreneur duo calls machining-as-a-service...

In this episode, Vijayant Rai, managing director – India, at Snowflake, gives us a quick update on the cloud-based data warehousing and analytics platform company’s plans in India. Rai took over as Snowflake India’s boss in January. He was previously at Microsoft where he was an executive director responsible for the banking and financial services business. In this conversation, Rai talks about th...

In this episode, Anirudh Sharma, co-founder and CEO of Digantara Research and Technologies, gives us a quick update on progress at his space situational awareness venture in Bengaluru. The aim now is for Digantara to become a more holistic platform providing broader space domain awareness, for both commercial and strategic purposes. In this conversation, Sharma also talks about the challenges of b...

In this episode, Rajan Anandan, a managing director at the venture capital firm Peak XV Partners, talks about how India’s deep tech ecosystem is today where the software-as-a-service (SaaS) sector was 10 years ago. In this conversation, Anandan, who also leads Peak XV’s Surge accelerator program for early-stage startups, talks about why there’s never been a better time to startup in deep tech in I...

In this episode, Arpit Agarwal, a partner at Blume Ventures, talks about how he sees India’s deep-tech ecosystem growing. Returns on successful deep-tech companies can be impressive, but the ecosystem will need to find ways to match the money for long-gestation projects with focused execution, Agarwal says. Even as the next generation of deep science and engineering-based startups begin to emerge...

Sriram K Rajamani, corporate vice president and managing director of Microsoft Research India Lab, reflects on how computer science and engineering research has evolved at the centre, in Bengaluru. In this conversation, Rajamani touches upon how AI and large language models can be harnessed to solve local needs, some of the technical aspects of how modern AI models work, and best practices from th...

In this episode, Woodside touched upon topics including the timing of his taking over the top job from Freshworks founder Girish Mathrubootham, who plans to focus on the company’s products strategy, how Freshworks might get to its first target of a billion dollars in revenue by 2026, and how Dennis views India – not only from the point of view of technical talent, but also as a market as Freshwork...

Agnikul Cosmos made a bit of Indian spacefaring history with the successful test of their Agnibaan SOrTeD (sub orbital technology demonstrator) rocket, which lifted off and flew as intended, on May 30. In this episode, recorded on June 6, Co-Founder and CEO Srinath Ravichandran and early investor Vishesh Rajaram, founding managing partner of Speciale Invest, offer a glimpse behind the scenes and i...

In this episode, Dennis Gada, Executive Vice President and Global Head of Banking and Financial Services at Infosys, talks about how banks are looking to tap digitalisation and what they are looking for from their IT vendors. Gada, who is also a member on the board of EdgeVerve Systems, Infosys’s products and platforms business, also talks about how core banking software is evolving in the age of...

In this episode, Vineet Dravid, Co-Founder and CEO of Oorja Energy, talks about his ambition of building a world-class deep tech company from Bengaluru, in the field of computer-aided engineering. Vineet gives us an update on the physics and machine learning based simulation and analytics product Oorja has developed. While the product is relevant to many industries, an immediate application is in...

In this episode, Euro Beinat, global head, AI and data science at Prosus, and his colleague Paul Van Der Boor, senior director, data science, explain how they went about building a 1000-person AI ecosystem across the global technology investor’s companies, around the globe. They also talk about Prosus’s internal AI efforts and what they learnt, for example, when an AI assistant they’d developed an...

In this episode, Peter J Arduini, president and CEO of GE HealthCare Technologies, talks about his plan to expand R&D and manufacturing in India. GE HealthCare has committed to investing a billion dollars in expanding these capabilities via its local joint venture Wipro GE HealthCare — a partnership that’s endured over more than three decades. Arduini also talks about how India is uniquely pos...

In this episode, Nimeet Dhokai, co-founder of Happi Planet Eco Products, talks about how he and his friend Mayank Gupta started their venture, determined to convert consumers to sustainable home care products. The two-year-old startup is backed by investors including 100X.VC and Fireside Ventures. Dhokai also talks about how he and Gupta found a successful combination of effective products and mee...

In this episode, Jaya Jagadish, Country Head and Senior Vice President at AMD India, talks about why the company is very optimistic about the prospects of India’s fledgling semiconductor ecosystem over the next decade. Jaya also talks about how, over the last 20 years, AMD India has become the company’s biggest global R&D location at a time when the multinational chip maker is ramping up its e...

In this episode, Dr. Jahnavi Phalkey, founding director of the Science Gallery Bengaluru, talks about how she got to be a historian of science and technology. Jahnavi, who recently won the Infosys Prize for 2023 in the humanities category, harnesses a historian’s discipline and a storyteller’s craft to try and make science accessible to everyone. And, in her own words, to show that science doesn’t...

In this episode, Annu Talreja, founder and CEO of Accacia, talks about how her company is helping real estate businesss accelerate their efforts to decarbonise their operations. Annu, an architect and urban planner by training, is building a carbon tracking and decarbonisation recommendation platform as a service platform at Accacia, her second venture, backed by marquee investors including Accel,...

In this episode, Rafee Tarafdar, chief technology officer at Infosys, talks about what generative AI might mean for the future of the IT services industry. Rafee, who’s also a senior vice president and the head of the company’s strategic technology group, explains how becoming an “AI first” company, back-to-back with adapting to the “cloud-first” transformation in the industry, is changing Infosys...

In this episode, Sidhant Rastogi, managing partner at Zinnov, a technology consultancy in Bengaluru, talks about why engineering R&D services is a promising area of outsourcing at the cusp of its next big phase of growth. As the world makes the energy transition from fossil fuel to renewables, the scope of the work that the Indian providers can offer is set to approach close to tier-1 supplier...

Jyoti Gera, global general manager at GE HealthCare for general imaging and primary care ultrasound, talks about the future of precision medicine, including in markets such as India where access and affordability are crucial factors. Gera also talks about her own career, starting out as an engineer and rising to running a multi-billion-dollar engineering-intensive business, and why someone startin...

In this episode of Deep Tech India, GS Madhusudan, co-founder and CEO of Incore Semiconductors, gives us a sense of how we missed the bus on the semiconductor opportunity, decades ago. He also talks about how we have the opportunity today, and most of the ingredients, to build our own semiconductor ecosystem that could supply the world with made-in-India chips, starting with embedded applications.

In this episode, tech entrepreneur Madan Padaki talks about his journey from founding MeritTrak to the Head Held High Foundation and OneBridge. The foundation is a non-profit organisation that focuses on training rural youth. Over the last 15 years or so, it has touched about 30,000 youth. Padaki also talks about how he sees philanthropy and entrepreneurship as two faces of a coin – with the forme...

Welcome to another episode of EcoPreneurs. In this episode, Bhaktha Keshavachar gives us a quick update on his four-year old company Chara, in Bengaluru, where he and his fellow co-founders are close to commercializing a type of motor that eliminates the need for rare-earth metals. In this conversation, Bhaktha walks us through the significance of this, explains the technology they’ve developed, a...

In this episode, Harrick Vin, CTO, and Sivaraman Ganesan, head of the AI.Cloud business unit at Tata Consultancy Services, talk about the company’s AI and generative AI strategies. With software and AI-based automation set to accelerate through this year and beyond, the aim is to augment customers’ ability to get more from technology in every aspect of their operations, and help them become owners...

In this episode, Satish Ramchandani, co-founder and chief business officer of Updapt, gives us a quick update about the company which offers software solutions for businesses to manage their ESG, meaning environment, sustainability and governance, reporting. Updapt’s software product is past the product-market fit, Satish says, and the company has about 75 enterprise customers. The product is buil...