Mansoor Khan’s other network

Mansoor Khan appears in a scene that would be familiar to almost anyone who has gone back to college after a few years away. On January 25, 2020, more than a hundred BITS alumni gathered at the Hyderabad campus. There was lunch, cake and a tour. The returning batches planted saplings beside the path to H block. Later, an auditorium session brought together campus and alumni leaders, including Khan, then head of the BITSAA Silicon Valley chapter.

The occasion had room for both the official address and the pleasure of seeing an old place again. A campus reunion is a curious appointment: everyone arrives with a newer résumé and an older version of themselves. Khan came with a career in technology services. His connection to BITS had survived the changing company names and job titles.

Three years later, he would become the founding CEO of Veltris, joining two engineering businesses under one name. Put those two moments beside each other and a useful question emerges. What does an executive actually build over the course of a career? A company, certainly. Also a set of relationships that can keep finding new purposes. In Khan’s case, the professional and alumni circles repeatedly cross.

02Fourteen years before the combination

Khan studied Management Studies at BITS Pilani, attending from 1992 to 1997. His early professional stretch lasted fourteen years at the business that evolved through Hughes Software, Flex and Aricent. He eventually led its Americas Western Region. That is a substantial apprenticeship in a sector where the customer’s technical problem and the supplier’s commercial problem must somehow fit into the same meeting.

He later became executive vice president and business head at Terralogic. He helped the company grow from its Infonam beginnings to more than a thousand people. His roles have covered sales, strategy, corporate development and operations. That range offers a practical way to read his subsequent CEO appointments: the assignment included finding the business, organizing the work and making the organization able to deliver it.

By 2019, Khan was publicly appearing as Wavelabs’s CEO in the lineup for an Artificial Intelligence in Consulting conference in New Delhi. The topic placed technical expertise beside a business audience. Consulting has a particular talent for producing a large vocabulary around a fairly direct question: what can we help someone do? Wavelabs’s work gave Khan several concrete answers.

03The network with actual packets

In February 2021, Khan and Narendra Dhara of ACL Digital were listed for a Magma 5G demonstration at the Magma Developers Conference. The gathering drew more than 580 people from 58 countries. Among the other sessions were mobile-network architecture, spectrum and deployments on cloud infrastructure. Here was a different sort of international network, with a rather less forgiving definition of a failed connection.

Magma was an open-source mobile core project. In 2022, when Wavelabs joined the Magma Core Foundation community, Khan put Magma Core and 5G at the center of the company’s strategy. The commitment included architecture, development and testing. Wavelabs also described distribution, support and integration services to help customers adopt the software.

Those are useful verbs. They put a services business inside the work that follows a technical idea. A demonstration has to become a system that someone else can operate. Code needs testing; components need integrating; customers need support. Khan’s public involvement in Magma gives his career a technical setting beyond the usual procession of executive titles. It also introduces collaborators whose contributions matter to the result.

04Two businesses, one wider remit

Veltris arrived through a combination announced in October 2023. Trive Capital and BayLink Capital backed the joining of Wavelabs Technologies and West Agile Labs. Khan became CEO; Pramod Dabir, previously West Agile’s founder and CEO, became president. The constituent businesses brought different histories: Wavelabs was founded in 2015, West Agile in 2012.

The pairing joined Wavelabs’s AI and engineering R&D capabilities with West Agile’s design and digital product work. The new company could take on assignments spanning embedded software through applications in the cloud. For Khan, the immediate promise was a broader set of services for clients. He described the partnership in those terms, with the emphasis on what the combined team could now offer.

Dabir’s own announcement thanked the investors and the wider leadership team, and welcomed working with Khan. Even a company formation, an event usually condensed to a logo and a transaction, arrives with a long list of people attached. The deal established the structure. Making the capabilities useful together was the operating assignment that followed.

There is a plain appeal to that idea. A client buying software work may need design, architecture, development and deployment within the same project. Bringing those skills into one business changes who can take responsibility for the whole sequence. It also gives the CEO a longer list of handoffs to get right. The new name makes a shorter introduction; the job behind it grows.

For an executive whose previous roles had included regional business leadership and operations, the combination drew on several kinds of experience at once. A technical team needs a clear assignment. A customer needs confidence about delivery. Investors need a business that can grow. The CEO occupies the space where those expectations meet. Veltris’s founding structure made that coordination central from the outset, with Khan and Dabir bringing their respective companies’ experience into the leadership team.

“Through this partnership with West Agile, we will be able to offer our clients a complete suite of software development services”

Mansoor Khan · on the formation of Veltris, 2023

05A little ceremony, a lot of names

Later in 2023, Veltris held its Annual CEO Award event. Photographs show blue trophies arranged in a row, a stage prepared for the evening and a table scattered with event wristbands. Corporate celebrations have their own visual grammar. The trophies are immaculate; somewhere behind each one is a considerably messier working week.

An employee, Ashwini Shetty, singled out the time Khan spent with the team. It is a small observation, but it belongs beside the formation announcement. One describes the business being assembled. The other describes an occasion on which people inside it gathered and received recognition. A leadership career has both scales, and the smaller one is often easier for colleagues to remember.

06Experience, in groups of three

The alumni work continued across those business chapters. In a 2024 reflection on BITSAA Silicon Valley, Jayan Ramankutty credited Khan, Saurabh Mohanty and their team with expanding BITSync. He pointed to Career Day and MovieNite as features of their term. The combination is pleasingly practical: help people think about their working lives, then give them something else to talk about.

By BITSync 2025, Khan was listed as a MentorConnect participant in entrepreneurship and in conversations about joining a board. The format was deliberately small: one mentor with three mentees. Around the program were people working in technology companies, startups, investment and other professional fields. The attraction was access to experience at conversational distance.

Career Day and MovieNite also suggest a sensible understanding of what makes a community worth returning to. Professional usefulness can get someone through the door. Shared occasions give people a reason to stay in touch between the moments when they need something. The volunteer names in the BITSync account matter for the same reason: the continuity belongs to a group. Khan’s part in it sits alongside the work of the people who came before him and those who carried the events forward.

That setting changes the unit of attention. A conference talk can address a room; a small group can make space for a particular career question. Entrepreneurship and board service are apt subjects for someone whose work has included running businesses, strategy and corporate development. His contribution sits within a wider volunteer effort, alongside other alumni willing to make their experience available.

Khan returned to BITS Pilani Hyderabad on October 9, 2025. During the visit, he discussed his entrepreneurial journey and possible future collaboration as a California-based founder working in stealth mode. The connection had acquired another chapter. The student years were long past, but the institution still had a reason to invite him back, and he still had a reason to come.

07The circle keeps widening

The Veltris leadership story moved on, too. Hiral Chandrana became CEO and a board member effective September 9, 2024. Khan’s role belongs to the company’s founding chapter. Keeping the dates straight makes the career more interesting: building a business includes beginnings, combinations and the arrival of another person to lead the next stage.

Khan is now listed as Head of Strategy and Growth at the Post-Industrial Institute, whose founder and CEO is Frode Odegard. The institute’s 2026 summit speaker roster also includes Khan. Its theme, autonomous organizations, places him in another discussion about the relationship between technical change and the way businesses organize themselves.

The sequence has a recognizable continuity. Telecom engineering supplied an early setting. Terralogic and Wavelabs brought company-building responsibilities. Veltris joined complementary businesses. Alumni gatherings made room for a different kind of exchange, with professional experience circulating back toward students, founders and peers. None of these activities happens through a title alone.

The photograph of an awards table, the program for a 5G demonstration and an invitation back to campus make an unusual set of career markers. Together, they bring the work into focus. Khan has spent years in businesses whose value depends on connecting capabilities. Alongside them, he has kept showing up in communities that connect people. The next conversation has several possible places to begin.