chennai
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Nithish Sairam
Nithish Sairam is the co-founder and CEO of Illumine-i, a solar and power-engineering design firm he built after stints at Tesla and NextEra Energy. Under his leadership the bootstrapped firm expanded from a five-person team to roughly 240 engineers across offices in Fremont, Austin, and Chennai, and has been described as the largest independent digital design engineering firm in the residential PV solar sector.
Prakash Govindan
Prakash Govindan is the co-founder and CEO of Gradiant, the water industry's first unicorn, valued above $1 billion. Raised in Chennai during monsoon failures that dried up his family's taps, he turned a childhood of hauling buckets into a PhD at MIT and a company that now renews billions of liters of industrial water a day for clients in semiconductors, pharma, food and beverage, and mining. He co-invented Gradiant's flagship Carrier Gas Extraction technology, holds more than 100 patents, and helped bring the TIME Best Invention 'ForeverGone' PFAS-destruction system to market. A devoted bhakti yogi who has read the Bhagavad Gita some fifty times, he runs one of the fastest-growing water companies on earth while preaching egoless leadership.
Aditya Vishwanath
Aditya Vishwanath is the co-founder and CEO of Inspirit, a Palo Alto edtech company that brings virtual and augmented reality into middle and high school STEM classrooms. A Georgia Tech computer scientist turned Stanford learning-sciences PhD, he built Inspirit to be the bridge between cutting-edge academic research and the everyday teacher. Before Inspirit he co-founded MakerGhat, a network of makerspaces for youth in low-income Mumbai neighborhoods. He is a Knight-Hennessy Scholar, Schmidt Futures Fellow, Ashoka Fellow, and a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in education.
Umesh Sachdev
Umesh Sachdev is the CEO and co-founder of Uniphore, a Palo Alto-based business AI company he started in Chennai in 2008 with college friend Ravi Saraogi. What began as a multilingual speech recognition startup incubated at IIT Madras has grown into one of the largest AI-native enterprise SaaS companies in the world, serving over 2,500 customers and approaching $1 billion in bookings. In October 2025 Uniphore closed a $260 million Series F co-led by NVIDIA, AMD, Snowflake and Databricks.
Rajiv Ramanan
Rajiv Ramanan is the Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Spendflo, an AI-native procurement platform that helps fast-growing companies bring structure, visibility, and control to how they buy and manage software vendors. A Chennai native now based in San Francisco, Rajiv spent years at Freshworks building partner ecosystems and working with over 5,000 vendors before co-founding Spendflo in 2021 alongside Siddharth Sridharan and Ajay Vardhan. Under his GTM leadership, Spendflo has raised $15.9M in total funding, grown to 140 employees, and manages over $100M in SaaS expenditure for customers—delivering an average 23% reduction in software spend.
Vignesh Girishankar
Vignesh Girishankar is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Rocketlane, a San Francisco-based professional services automation platform that has raised $105M in total funding. Before Rocketlane, he co-founded Konotor (acquired by Freshworks in 2015), where he transformed an in-app messaging tool into FreshChat, scaling it to $13M ARR. Based in Chennai, India, Vignesh is known for his rigorous customer discovery approach - conducting 80+ interviews spanning 200+ hours before writing a line of code - and for building category-defining enterprise software from India without relocating to Silicon Valley.