bits-pilani
(26)
Vignan Velivela and the cost of standing still
He worked on lunar rovers and self-driving cars. At AtoB, Vignan Velivela turned his attention to another transportation problem: the money that takes too long to arrive.
Amritanshu Jain and the business hiding inside the product
A customer noticed the engine inside Simplismart. For co-founder Amritanshu Jain, that conversation helped turn a broad machine-learning platform into a more focused bet on how AI runs.
Prem Jain and the Trouble with Being Early
His first startup had technology customers weren’t ready to buy. Decades later, the Pensando co-founder had learned to ask a more useful question: when will they be ready?
KK Gupta and the Trouble with Fifty Good Ideas
After 30 years inside global banks, KK Gupta left with a complaint: too many clever systems made everyday work needlessly complicated. At Facctum, he is trying to make the pieces fit - starting with the people.
Kalyan Kodali and the talent hiding in plain sight
When ValueMomentum needed more engineers, Kalyan “KK” Kodali looked toward places with room to train them. From Erie to Coimbatore, his career offers a close look at the patient work behind an insurance technology business.
Samay Kohli Keeps Going Back to the Floor
A student robot took Samay Kohli into warehouses around the world. After twelve years building GreyOrange, a stint behind a coffee counter and a new AI company have brought him back to a familiar question: what makes work work?
Krishna Yadappanavar and the Trouble with a Perfect Product
After co-founding Springpath, acquired by Cisco for $320 million, Krishna Yadappanavar helped build Kloudfuse around a different discipline: listening closely to the people who have to run the software.
A Failed Startup Became Suhail Khan's Operating System
QBox did not survive. Its lessons did - through a 100,000-reader media business, years of product work, a Carnegie Mellon degree and a new chapter building enterprise AI at Distyl.
Akash Gupta Is Teaching Warehouses to Think in Motion
He began with a humanoid, two suitcases of electronics and an impatience with theory. Now the GreyOrange co-founder is betting that the useful future of AI will be measured in shelves moved, orders shipped and decisions made on the warehouse floor.
Abhishek Nayak
After two exits, one shutdown and years spent watching teams rebuild the same back-office software, Abhishek Nayak found his durable idea in the work nobody puts on a billboard.
Srinivas Sarkar
Srinivas Sarkar is the co-founder and CEO of Coupl, a Y Combinator-backed neobank built for couples in India. After a stint as a management consultant at EY and a Founder in Residence run at Entrepreneur First, he set out to fix a gap he kept noticing: banking products for couples had not kept pace with how couples actually live. Coupl offers a zero-balance digital joint account that opens in under a minute and serves married, unmarried, and LGBTQ+ partners alike. The company has grown to 80,000+ couples and 300+ crore in transactions without paid advertising. Sarkar is a Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia honoree, an Entrepreneur 35 Under 35 listee, a BITS Pilani alumnus, and a three-time TEDx speaker.
Shiva Nathan
Shiva Nathan is the founder and CEO of Onymos, a Palo Alto software company he started in 2017 to end the endless rebuilding of the same app plumbing. A former head of Intuit's Platform and Services organization who also held engineering leadership roles at Oracle and CA, he built Onymos around a 'Features-as-a-Service' model that lets companies drop in login, payments, notifications and other features without handing over their data. Onymos has since expanded into AI-driven document processing for healthcare and life sciences through its DocKnow platform, including a collaboration with Mayo Clinic.
Shubham Mishra
Shubham Mishra is the co-founder and Global CEO of Pixis, a Burlingame, California company building codeless AI infrastructure that lets marketers deploy AI models without writing code. He dropped out of BITS Pilani to build a virtual reality headset with the startup Absentia, then pivoted into AI-driven marketing and grew Pixis from an early bet on AI to roughly $85M in ARR, raising $209M across its funding rounds. His pitch is consistent: strip the friction out of AI so any team can use it in minutes, not months.
Chetan Reddy
Chetan Reddy is the co-founder and CEO of Confido Health, a New York based startup building AI voice and messaging agents that answer patient calls around the clock and complete routine front-office work like scheduling, refills, eligibility checks and reminders. He started the company after watching the administrative load of the US healthcare system firsthand when his wife had spine surgery, and has grown Confido to more than 1,000 clinical sites and millions of patient interactions. An engineer by training from BITS Pilani, he previously built AI systems for drone mapping and a fitness app before turning to healthcare operations.
Abhijit Kane
Abhijit Kane is Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Postman, the world's leading API platform used by 20+ million developers and 98% of Fortune 500 companies. A BITS Pilani alumnus, he joined Abhinav Asthana and Ankit Sobti in 2014 to turn a viral Stack Overflow side project into a $5.6 billion company that defines how developers build, test, and collaborate on APIs.
Abhinav Asthana
Abhinav Asthana is the co-founder and CEO of Postman, the world's leading API platform used by over 35 million developers and 500,000 organizations. Growing up in small-town Uttar Pradesh, India, he taught himself programming as a child, built virtual tour software before finishing college, and turned a side project Chrome extension into a company valued at $5.6 billion. He moved Postman from Bangalore to San Francisco in 2017 and has raised $433 million in total funding, including a $225M Series D in 2021.
Abhishek Humbad
Abhishek Humbad is the Founder & CEO of Goodera, the world's largest corporate volunteering platform, connecting 500+ enterprises - including 75+ Fortune 500 companies like Amazon, Nike, Oracle, and Target - with 50,000+ nonprofits across 100+ countries. A BITS Pilani and IIM Bangalore alumnus and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Humbad co-founded Goodera in 2014 after pioneering NextGen, India's first cloud-based CSR management platform. Under his leadership, Goodera has mobilized 2 million+ volunteers across 1,000+ cities in 30+ languages, raised $26M+ in funding, and now deploys an AI Ops Brain managing 100,000+ tasks monthly - treating volunteering not as a charity checkbox, but as infrastructure for workplace belonging.
Anirudh Singla
Anirudh Singla is the Founder & CEO of Pepper, an AI-powered content marketing platform headquartered in San Francisco. He co-founded Pepper from his BITS Pilani dorm room in 2017, bootstrapped it to profitability by graduation, and has since scaled it to serve Google, Meta, Amazon, Adobe, and 85% of India's unicorns — raising $23.5M from Bessemer Venture Partners and Lightspeed along the way. Recognized on Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2021, he is building what he calls the infrastructure for the global content economy.
Chaithanya Yambari
Chaithanya Yambari is the Co-Founder and CTO of Zluri, a next-generation Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) platform that helps enterprise IT teams discover, manage, secure, and automate their SaaS applications. An engineer from BITS Pilani, he spent nearly a decade rising from software developer to Director of Engineering at gamification startup KNOLSKAPE before co-founding Zluri in 2020 alongside Ritish Reddy and Sethu Meenakshisundaram. Under his technical leadership, Zluri has raised $32M in total funding - including a $20M Series B led by Lightspeed Venture Partners in July 2023 - and now serves 270+ employees and hundreds of enterprise customers worldwide.
Lalith Gudipati
Lalith Gudipati is Co-Founder of Dashverse, a San Francisco-based AI entertainment company building tools to democratize storytelling at scale. With a background in high-velocity growth at Pocket FM and Moonfrog Labs, Lalith brings a data-driven operator's lens to an ambitious creative vision - Dashverse's suite (Dashtoon, DashReels, Frameo.AI) has amassed over 20 million users worldwide. In August 2025, the company closed a $13M Series A led by Peak XV Partners, cementing its place as a leader in AI-native entertainment.
Malhar Patil
Malhar Patil is the Co-Founder and COO of Flam, a San Francisco- and Bengaluru-based AI-native mixed reality platform that lets brands deliver immersive, app-less 3D experiences via QR codes and links — powering campaigns for Google, Samsung, Emirates, and even Kamala Harris's US presidential run. A BITS Pilani chemical engineering graduate and Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 honoree (2022), Malhar pivoted from consulting (Oracle) and sports-wellness management (Stepathlon) to build one of India's most globally ambitious adtech startups, raising $22M in total funding including a $14M Series A led by RTP Global in May 2025.
Naveen Gupta
Naveen Gupta is the co-founder and CEO of Birdeye, a Palo Alto-based AI-powered customer experience platform that serves over 100,000 businesses globally. Inspired by a personal struggle to find a quality surgeon for his mother at Stanford, Naveen and his brother Neeraj built Birdeye in 2012 to help businesses manage their online reputation and grow through customer feedback. Under his leadership, Birdeye crossed $100M ARR in 2023, raised over $93M in total funding, and pioneered what Naveen calls 'Experience Marketing' - the discipline of turning customer satisfaction into organic growth. A veteran of Yahoo and RingCentral, he brings deep product and operational expertise to one of SaaS's quietest success stories.
Shourya Agarwal
Shourya Agarwal is the Founder and CEO of Flam, a San Francisco-based AI-native mixed reality platform that lets brands create and deploy app-less immersive experiences in under 300 milliseconds. A BITS Pilani computer science graduate, Shourya co-founded what started as Homingos - a viral AR smartphoto app that hit #1 on Google Play in two months - and evolved it into Flam, which now serves 100+ global brands including Google, Samsung, Netflix, and Emirates, reaching 380 million users. Recognized on Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 in 2022, Shourya raised a $14M Series A from RTP Global in May 2025, bringing total funding to $22M.
Varun Deshpande
Varun Deshpande is the co-founder and CEO of Juno, a San Francisco-based crypto-native digital banking platform that bridges traditional finance and decentralized finance for the US market. A serial entrepreneur from BITS Pilani, he previously co-founded BeeWise (acquired by Aditya Birla Money), Nuo Network (a DeFi lending protocol), and TopTalent.in. With Juno, he has raised $24M across seed and Series A rounds from top-tier investors including Sequoia Surge, Polychain, ParaFi Capital, and Jump Crypto, building a platform that lets users earn, spend, and manage crypto alongside traditional banking.
Rakesh Vaddadi
Rakesh Vaddadi is the Co-Founder and CEO of Beacon.li, a Milpitas-based AI orchestration platform that automates enterprise software implementation - from configuration and testing to deployment and hypercare support. A BITS Pilani computer science alumnus and serial entrepreneur, Rakesh previously co-founded WINDO (an Instagram commerce platform used by 200,000+ sellers in 144 countries) and Gear6 (a bike maintenance startup). At Beacon.li, he is tackling one of enterprise software's biggest blind spots: the gap between a signed contract and a successful go-live, using AI agents that learn through the UI without any backend access. The company raised a $7M Series A in March 2025 led by Sorin Investments.
Ashish Pratap Singh
Ashish Pratap Singh is an Indian software engineer turned full-time creator who built AlgoMaster - a newsletter, platform, and YouTube channel helping 700,000+ developers crack coding interviews. After stints at Morgan Stanley, Amazon, and Adobe, he quit his SDE-2 role at Amazon US in mid-2024 to return to India and build AlgoMaster.io from scratch. His newsletter grew from zero to 140,000+ subscribers in roughly 12 months, and his GitHub repositories have accumulated 85,000+ stars.