Vasudeva Varma
CEO
Ramesh Loganathan
COO
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Ramesh Loganathan is currently the Professor of Co-Innovation at IIIT-Hyderabad where he Heads the Research/Innovation outreach. He is also the Chief Operating Officer of Centre For Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) at IIIT.
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Ramesh was also the Chief Innovation Officer of State Innovation Cell of Government of Telangana
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Ramesh brings with him almost 25+ years of vast executive leadership experience with a successful track record in running multi-million dollar companies. Prior to IIIT, Ramesh was the Managing Director of Progress Software, India and was responsible for leading product development at the India Development Center He provided strategic guidance to the teams with a focus on cross-product consideration for SOA & Data Integration.
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Ramesh has also held the position of Vice President at Paramati Technologies. As the VP he was responsible for managing the Product Engineering which included managing the product lines, product releases, product architecture, systems, and processes.
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He is also the Co-Founder of HeadStart Network, a volunteer organization that helped to build an early-stage startup eco-system in Hyderabad and pan India. Until recently he was the part of the core team and drives the Hyderabad end of the events including monthly Startup Saturdays and the annual HeadStart startups’ showcase.
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Until recently he was the President of HYSEA (Hyderabad Software Industry Association) and Regional Council Member at Nasscom.
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After a 2 decade-long stint as an accomplished Technologist in the product R&D space, on Dec 2015, Ramesh moved full-time into academics.
Radha Rangarajan
Head, Innovation and Strategy - OJAS MedTech BioNEST
- Radha Rangarajan is Head, Innovation, and Strategy at Ojas. She is a biotech entrepreneur and an expert in the field of Antimicrobial Resistance.
- Radha received her Bachelor’s degree in Biology from Stanford University, Master of Science degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and her Ph.D. in Neurobiology/Genetics from Rockefeller University, New York. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health.
- Radha moved back to India in 2003 and joined the Drug Discovery division of Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories. Thereafter, she co-founded Vitas Pharma in 2011, where she has driven the scientific strategy to identify novel antibiotics to treat highly resistant infections and companion diagnostics.
- Radha was awarded the FICCI Award of Excellence- Women in R&D in February 2019. She was selected to be part of the “Champions of Change” initiative of Prime Minister Modi and the NITI Ayog, recognizing India’s emerging entrepreneurs in 2017. She has published widely and presented her research at multiple international conferences.
Anubhav Tiwari
Head - Incubation, Community & Corporate Innovation
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Anubhav Tiwari is currently working with Centre for Innovation & Entrepreneurship at International Institute Information Technology (https://www.iiit.ac.in/), Hyderabad, India. Prior to IIIT, he was heading Association of MSME in IT which is a Think Tank of BJP that supports the Government of India in designing Public Policies. His role there was to develop, lead and manage strategic insights to promote and represent Indian ICT MSMEs. AIM-IT helped the MSMEs through policy advocacy on issues & challenges of Indian ICT MSMEs.
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Anubhav was the Chief Operating Officer of TEZ, from 2015 to 2017, which is a Startup Accelerator, Entrepreneurship Training and Incubation Centre located in Hyderabad, India It runs a 6 month Startup Accelerator Program jointly with Central University of Hyderabad. Anubhav represented TEZ as the registered Hand Holding & Help Centre under Government of India’s Start-Up & Stand Up India Policy.
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He is the Advisory Board Member of Indywood International Film Festival. He is one of the key speaker/mentor at the festival and every year mentors over 25+ film and media related startups at the event. He guides the team on program layouts, panel discussion, choosing the right categories for awards and helps in reference to getting key delegates to the event.
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He is also the Founder of Virtual Slaps, a company that is into Mass Media, Communications and Advertising. Virtual Slaps is also a production house, which promotes short films, and theatre plays.
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In addition to his experience and professional acumen, he has a sound educational foundation and a passion for writing on startups. He has presented papers on ‘Neuromarketing’ & “Role of Micro Finance in Developing SHGs into Micro Enterprises: A study of Guntur District in AP” in International Conferences. He is currently working on a paper titled: “Does Female Founding Members Impact Performance Of Start-ups?”
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He holds a Post Graduate Diploma in Management, Banking, Insurance, Finance and Financial Services from Institute of Public Enterprise, India. His areas of interest are Emotional Intelligence, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Strategy, Venture Capital, Startups, Video Gaming and Mass Media. Anubhav has been a speaker at several conferences and seminars and business schools on topics ranging from Emotional Intelligence, Business Strategy, Leadership, Innovation, Branding, Advertising Communications, and Entrepreneurship.
Dr. Sonali Khanra
Head, Accelerators
- Dr. Sonali is Head – Accelerator and resident tech mentor for MedTech startups at CIE. She has more than a decade of experience in the life sciences and healthcare domain.
- Prior to joining CIE, Dr. Sonali has worked in the capacity of Incubation Manager for a VC firm, heading their Hyderabad unit. Her primary responsibilities included domain support & business consultancy to life science-based incubates, assessment & evaluation of various startups & their KPIs, key stakeholder management and business development.
- Dr. Sonali pursued her Ph.D. in developing a nanomedicine-based delivery vehicle which can cross the blood-brain barrier and provide cure to brain tumor using receptor-mediated targeting. She has presented her work in multiple conferences and published several peer-reviewed journals. She has also carried out her post-doctoral research in the field of Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT)/ Lateral Transfer (LT) of degradative traits, especially the OPH coding opd gene clusters in bacteria.
- Prior to PhD, she has also worked in the capacity Senior Lecturer in Amity Institute of Biotechnology, Amity University and as a Business Development Manager in a reputed pharma company.
- Dr. Sonali also holds M.Phil from Delhi University and did her masters in life sciences from Jamia Millia Islamia.
Kriti Tiwari
Asst. Manager - HR & Administration
Resident Mentors
Sandeep Pallavolu
Resident Mentor
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Sandeep Reddy Pallavolu is the Co-Founder, Chief Product.
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An officer at TheCapitalNet. Additionally, Sandeep Reddy Pallavolu has had 1 past job as the Investment Banking Analyst at Macquarie Group.
Dr. Anu Gupta
Resident Mentor
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Featured among “the Top Inspiring Women Investors” in the Indian startup ecosystem, Dr. Anu Gupta is an MBA from the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad and a trained Physician Pathologist (MBBS MD Pathology). In her exciting journey, Anu has worn multiple hats from a doctor and a drug scientist to an entrepreneur and an angel investor.
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Dr. Anu brings a peerless outlook through her extensive experience in the global pharmaceutical industry and Indian hospitals. As a pathologist, Dr. Anu served in Safdarjung Hospital and Apollo Hospitals. Later, she joined the R&D division of Novartis, a Swiss multinational pharmaceutical company, wherein she held various leadership roles in the India global office and led global clinical trials at the company headquarters in Switzerland.
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As a Charter member of TIE Amravati, Dr. Anu has contributed immensely towards Andhra Pradesh’s evolving startup ecosystem. She was instrumental in promoting women entrepreneurship in Telangana as CM, TIE Hyderabad. She is on the board of mentors and panel of advisors of various incubators and accelerators including IIT Kanpur, ISB D-labs incubator, AICs, Nasscom, BIRAC committee and European accelerator Spark10.
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She holds a portfolio of early-stage tech start-ups and has been an investor member of Hyderabad Angels and TIE Amravati Angels. She has also been a partner with Ah! Ventures.
Gaggan Gupta
Resident Mentor
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Gagan is a serial-entrepreneur and an angel investor who brings a unique perspective from his diverse experience across sectors. He is deeply committed to the startup ecosystem as an Expert panelist, jury member, mentor, and advisor. Gagan provides his expertise to various institutions, incubators, and accelerators. A seasoned strategist with a penchant for incubating business ideas and turning them into high-potential ventures. Gagan is currently building his new venture, a b2b hyperlocal logistics start-up (Ezeeli).
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Gagan is an engineer (B.Tech Computer science) and holds an MBA degree from Global Top-10 IE Business School, Madrid, Spain. He is a member of the Rajasthan Angel Innovators Network (RAIN) and TIE Rajasthan.
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Gagan’s investment philosophy is to promote high-octane teams working on promising business ideas. Currently, Gagan is scouting for early-stage startups working on emerging/futuristic technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Predictive Analytics, Machine Learning, etc.
Sanjay Jesrani
Resident Mentor
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Sanjay Jesrani is the Founder & CEO of Go North Ventures.
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Go North is an angel investment and advisory firm, focused on investing in & mentoring Startups. It also provides Strategy inputs to high growth Early stage companies and SMB’s moving to their next orbit.
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Sanjay, an active member of the Indian Angel Network, the premier national group of Angel Investors – has investments in startups across the Healthcare, Education, Impact, Consumer and Tech sectors. A Charter member at TiE, Hyderabad (The Indus Entrepreneurs), he is also on the advisory board of Parampara Capital, an early stage fund and 50K Network, an emerging national investor network.
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He was the Executive Vice President & Head, Global Delivery Center, Hitachi Consulting India. As CEO and Head of the Global Delivery Center at India, he led the company’s global delivery team of 1800+ across the centers at Hyderabad, Pune and Bangalore.
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As a member of Hitachi Consulting’s Exec Leadership Team, he was actively involved in the company’s Growth strategy and M&A programs targeted at reaching the $1B + size. He was a core member of the India and South Asia Hitachi group company CEO network.
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Sanjay brings over 20 years of solid execution experience from his previous role at Sierra Atlantic, as the CFO – Asia & China.”
Gautham Shiva
Resident Mentor
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Gautam is a seasoned business leader with over two decades of experience, predominantly in financial services. He has considerable experience in the offshoring industry and has an established track record of consistently achieving stretched business targets, building dynamic teams and driving colleague engagement.
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Gautam has managed diverse teams across multiple locations, championing lean and automation initiatives delivering significant benefits and improvements that have enabled a high-performance culture.
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He has held a number of leadership roles with both third-party service providers (Equinox Global Services) and offshoring captives of multinational organisations (Lehman Brothers and Barclays). He has operated in an integrated/team extension model across offshore and onshore locations, including spearheading Barclays’ U.K. operations servicing Fraud Detection and Investigations, Collections, Merchant Servicing, and Personal Banking operations across approximately 1500 employees.
Rakesh Bhatia
Resident Mentor
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Rakesh Bhatia is the Founder & CEO of TheCapitalNet.
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Business leader with a successful track record of creating and scaling multi-million technology and BPM businesses in various worldwide geographies, in turn growing stakeholder value.
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He holds an Executive PG in Management, IIM, Kozhikode.
Sridhar Lanka
Resident Mentor
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Sridhar has about 20 years of experience in technology and innovation evangelism across multiple industries.
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Identify market opportunities, define customer segments, innovate, commercialize and deliver solutions for those opportunities have been his expertise over the years. Sridhar’s broad geographical experience and regional insights drive in this endeavor.
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Throughout his career, Sridhar was instrumental to incorporate innovation, go to market, growth strategy, delivery management of Innovations.
Ravi GSR
Resident Mentor
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Intraprenuer 10x and Entrepreneur 1x.
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Over the past 15+ years I spent time at responsible positions across sectors that honed my business prowess, exposure to newer areas in M&A, Venture Building, Strategic & Operations Management interventions and benefit the organizations associated with.
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With my Entrepreneurial stint, committed/determined to make the world a better place and love to do what I do – trailblazing, venture building with motivated, passionate businesses/people, realize their ideas & help find that situation (impact) where they can really be along the way.
Vikrant Varshney
Resident Mentor
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Vikrant Varshney is a Co-Founder & Managing Partner at SucSEED Venture Partners.
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Prior to joining SucSEED Venture Partner, He is previously the Chief of Board of Advisors and Chief Risk Officer & Managing Partner at Risk Resources.
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Mr. Varshney received a B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering at Aligarh Muslim University and earned an MBA in Strategy & Systems at International Management Institute – IMI.
Ajay Jain
Resident Mentor
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He is the Sr. Vice President in Magnaquest Technologies, responsible for strategy, GTM planning & execution for entry into new verticals for the subscription billing & CRM products at Magnaquest. Giving the entire organization a facelift while ensuring we add value to our customers in the present age economic & financial settings.
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Principal Co-founder of Xseed is a start-up advisory & consulting firm.
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Principal Co-founder of Investment & advisory for early-stage start-ups.
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He received a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering at Osmania University and earned an MBA in Strategy & Systems at the Indian School of Business – ISB.
Mahesh Iyer
Resident Mentor
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Mahesh Iyer has over 20 years of experience in research and development in healthcare. He has been responsible for guiding many products through the development life-cycle. Before co-founding Sineflex Solutions, Mahesh was at Novartis in various roles, including Site Head, Biostatistics at Hyderabad, and Global head for Exploratory Safety and Statistical Analytics. Prior to Novartis, Mahesh worked with Bristol Myers Squibb and Boehringer Ingelheim. He also helped start the BIRAC funded med-tech accelerator at the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, IIIT Hyderabad.
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At Novartis, Mahesh was also one of the core members of the Innovation Council. In this role, Mahesh was responsible for leading many partnerships between Novartis and start-ups as well as academic institutions, especially focusing in the areas of machine learning and deep learning, NLP and computer vision. Mahesh brings a strong analytical mindset, deep insights into healthcare development and a proven record of implementing innovative solutions in the healthcare domain. Mahesh is passionate about enhancing industry-academia collaboration; he set up one of the first part-time Ph.D. programs in Statistics for Novartis associates, teaches at a number of Indian universities and has chaired multiple conferences over the years. He is currently Secretary of the Indian Association for Statistics in Clinical Trials and President of the International Indian Statistical Association, India Chapter.
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Apart from his functional activities, Mahesh has led various organizational developmental activities and training. He is a certified coach in the areas of emotional intelligence, assessment centers, and psychometric evaluations. He has over 500 hours of training and coaching experience. Mahesh has completed his Ph.D. in Statistics from Temple University, Philadelphia.
Advisory Council
Dr. Arun Tiwari
Director, CARE Hospital
Dr. Ambuj Chaturvedi
Associate Director, Medtronics Labs
Dr. Sai Praveen
Global Physician, India & America
Shakti Nagappan
Director, Life Sciences and Pharma - Telangana Government
Dr. Ravi Sirdeshmukh
Ex CCMB – Head Proteomics
Dr. Manish Diwan
Head - Strategy Partnership & Entrepreneurship Development at BIRAC, Department of Biotechnology, Government of India
Dr. Manish Diwan
Head - Strategy Partnership & Entrepreneurship Development at BIRAC, Department of Biotechnology, Government of India
Steering Committee
Prof. Ramesh Loganathan
Professor - Co-innovation, IIIT Hyderabad
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Ramesh Loganathan is currently the Professor of Co-Innovation at IIIT-Hyderabad where he Heads the Research/Innovation outreach. He is also the Chief Operating Officer of Centre For Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) at IIIT.
-
Ramesh was also the Chief Innovation Officer of State Innovation Cell of Government of Telangana
-
Ramesh brings with him almost 25+ years of vast executive leadership experience with a successful track record in running multi-million dollar companies. Prior to IIIT, Ramesh was the Managing Director of Progress Software, India and was responsible for leading product development at the India Development Center He provided strategic guidance to the teams with a focus on cross-product consideration for SOA & Data Integration.
-
Ramesh has also held the position of Vice President at Paramati Technologies. As the VP he was responsible for managing the Product Engineering which included managing the product lines, product releases, product architecture, systems, and processes.
-
He is also the Co-Founder of HeadStart Network, a volunteer organization that helped to build an early-stage startup eco-system in Hyderabad and pan India. Until recently he was the part of the core team and drives the Hyderabad end of the events including monthly Startup Saturdays and the annual HeadStart startups’ showcase.
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Until recently he was the President of HYSEA (Hyderabad Software Industry Association)and Regional Council Member at Nasscom.
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After a 2 decade-long stint as an accomplished Technologist in the product R&D space, on Dec 2015, Ramesh moved full-time into academics.
Ramjee Pallela
COO at AIC-CCMB
Meenakshi Vishwanathan
Head-Resource Generation and Alumni Affairs, IIIT-Hyderabad
Prof. Kavita Vemuri
Associate Professor - IIIT Hyderabad
Prof. Azeemuddin Syed
Associate Professor - IIIT Hyderabad
Shakti Nagappan
Director, Life Sciences and Pharma - Telangana Government