Abhay Singhal co-founded InMobi in 2007 from a shared Mumbai apartment with three IIT Kanpur classmates, and helped build it into India's first unicorn and the world's largest independent mobile advertising platform - reaching 1.3 billion people across 190+ countries. As CEO of InMobi Advertising, he now leads a platform serving 80 billion daily impressions, while InMobi prepares for a 2026 IPO targeting a $4-5 billion valuation. An angel investor in Razorpay, Bright Money, and Goldcast, Singhal is known for betting on mobile-first futures before anyone else did.
Amitabh Sinha is the Co-Founder of Workspot, Inc., a cloud PC and virtual desktop infrastructure company based in Campbell, California. After earning a B.Tech from IIT Kanpur and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he built a career across Oracle, Informix, and Citrix - where he ran the XenDesktop product line as VP of Product Management - before co-founding Workspot in 2012 with Puneet Chawla and Ty Wang. He served as CEO for over a decade, steering the company through five funding rounds to $86.75M in total capital raised, and pioneering innovations like the industry's first cloud PC with 99.99% SLA availability. In April 2024, he transitioned to Chief Strategy Officer.
Avinash Misra is the CEO and co-founder of Skan AI, a Menlo Park-based enterprise AI company pioneering process intelligence and agentic automation. A serial entrepreneur who graduated from IIT Kanpur, he previously co-founded Endeavour Software Technologies — acquired by Genpact in 2015 — before launching Skan in 2018 with longtime partner Manish Garg. Skan has raised $54M in total funding, landed on the 2025 Deloitte Technology Fast 500, and launched the Agentic Ontology of Work (AOW) — a first-of-its-kind semantic framework for human-AI collaboration — positioning the company as the context infrastructure layer for the enterprise AI era.
Dheeraj Pandey is the co-founder and CEO of DevRev, an AI-native CRM and support platform valued at $1.15 billion. A serial unicorn builder, he previously co-founded Nutanix in 2009 and led it as CEO through its 2016 Nasdaq IPO, scaling it to an $18+ billion enterprise. Born in Patna, Bihar, India, he arrived in the US in 1997 with $900 borrowed from education trusts, earned his MS at UT Austin, and spent over two decades building distributed systems before founding two generational companies. He sits on Adobe's board and has donated over $20 million to humanitarian causes, including a $10 million gift to UT Austin for personalized medicine research.
Sailesh Kumar is the founder and CEO of Baya Systems, a Santa Clara startup building unified fabric and chiplet interconnect software for AI silicon. A former Intel Fellow and the co-founder of NetSpeed Systems (acquired by Intel in 2018), he holds more than 150 patents and is among the most-cited engineers in network-on-chip design.
Amit Narayan is the Co-Founder and CEO of GridCARE, a Redwood City-based generative AI company that unlocks hidden power grid capacity to slash data center connection timelines from 5-7 years to 6-12 months. A serial entrepreneur with a PhD from UC Berkeley and a B.Tech from IIT Kanpur, he previously founded AutoGrid (acquired by Schneider Electric in 2022) and Berkeley Design Automation (acquired by Mentor Graphics in 2014), and holds 7 U.S. patents across semiconductor design and energy software. GridCARE emerged from stealth in May 2025 with a $13.5M seed round led by Xora and backed by Tom Steyer, Ram Shriram, and Breakthrough Energy, targeting what Narayan calls the defining constraint on AI: immediate access to power.
Ambuj Kumar is the co-founder and CEO of Simbian, an AI-native security company building autonomous AI agents that run security operations 10x faster than human teams. A Gold Medalist from IIT Kanpur and Stanford EE graduate, he spent eight years designing NVIDIA's early GPUs before pivoting to security - where he invented Confidential Computing, raised $135M for Fortanix, and is now betting that AI agents can solve the industry's 3.5-million-person talent gap. With 100+ patents and recognition from IIT Kanpur's Distinguished Alumni Award 2025, Kumar stands at the intersection of the GPU revolution he helped build and the AI security era he is now shaping.
Suhail Abidi is the Co-Founder and CEO of Cube (cubehq.ai), an autonomous AI marketing platform serving multi-location brands like KFC and Taco Bell. A chemical engineer from IIT Kanpur who won the Stanford Reliance Dhirubhai MBA Fellowship - full ride, no internship - he spent his Stanford summer learning to code instead of collecting a consulting paycheck. Before Cube, he built Tinystep into a 600,000-user parenting network that Flipkart backed with $2M and BabyChakra eventually acquired. He is a serial entrepreneur with a consistent pattern: spot a real problem, learn whatever skill is missing, build the company.
Karttikeya Mangalam is the Founder and CEO of SigIQ.ai, a Berkeley-based AI tutoring startup that raised $9.5M in seed funding to make elite-level, personalized education accessible globally. A PhD graduate from UC Berkeley's BAIR lab with 40+ published papers and 10,000+ citations, he grew up in Muzaffarpur, Bihar and built an AI tutor that set the all-time record on India's notoriously brutal UPSC civil service exam — scoring 175/200, beating 1.3 million candidates in under 7 minutes.
Nakul Mandan is the founder and managing partner of Audacious Ventures, a $250M pre-seed and seed-stage venture capital firm based in San Francisco. A graduate of IIT Kanpur and IIM Lucknow, he arrived in the US in 2009 on an H-1B visa and spent a decade investing at Battery Ventures and Lightspeed before launching Audacious in April 2020 — during COVID lockdowns. His firm's unconventional edge: embedding a full recruiting operation inside a VC fund, with technical recruiters actively running executive and engineering searches for portfolio companies. He has backed companies including WorkOS, Tome, FalconX, and Multiverse, and is known for his framework of five founder traits: high IQ, outsized ambition, the ability to make people believe, grit, and velocity.
Pooja Nath Sankar is an Indian-American tech entrepreneur best known as the founder and former CEO of Piazza, an online Q&A and collaborative learning platform used by millions of students across 1,500+ universities. Born in a rural village in northern India with no electricity, she became the first girl from her hometown to attend an IIT, went on to work at Facebook, and left pre-IPO stock options on the table to attend Stanford GSB and build Piazza. She stepped down as CEO in 2022 to focus on family and teaching.