iit-kanpur
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Anurag Singh and the art of the second act
After building and selling Education Management Solutions with Sharada Singh, Anurag Singh returned to the startup world from the other side of the table. At IIT Kanpur, his next project pairs research with capital and people who have run a business.
Sunil Jain’s business depends on what you never notice
From Bell Labs to Interra Systems, Sunil Jain has spent his career building tools for other engineers. His company’s work comes into view when pictures freeze, captions drift, or a stream goes wrong.
SIIC makes room for the hard part
A ventilator built in 90 days reveals what IIT Kanpur’s incubator really supplies: the people, tools and patient support between an invention and a customer.
Amit Kumar Agarwal and the cost of an introduction
A broker wanted to be paid again for a landlord Amit Kumar Agarwal already knew. The former banker’s answer became NoBroker - and a much longer education in what it takes to make a simple idea work.
Dilsher Singh Malhi and the game that outgrew its board
A childhood habit of organizing games became Zupee, a business built around India’s familiar pastimes. Now its founder faces a different test: carrying his ideas about human behavior into a future beyond gaming.
Mukesh Bansal and the art of starting over
Myntra began with names printed on T-shirts. Mukesh Bansal’s career took shape when he learned to change the plan - and, eventually, to enjoy being a beginner again.
Dhruv Gupta and the Business of Beginning Again
He co-founded DynPro in 1996. Three decades later, Dhruv Gupta is still working on the distance between a new technology and a business that can use it.
Ishendra Agarwal and the jewellery for an ordinary Tuesday
GIVA’s co-founder saw room between costly gold and disposable fashion jewellery. Building a business in that space meant learning everything from anonymous chat apps to the very public business of opening shops.
Deepanshu Arora and the school that became a software company
Before Toddle served schools around the world, it was a practical fix for teachers at a preschool in Ahmedabad. Deepanshu Arora’s journey follows a stubborn question: how much more could teachers do if their tools stopped getting in the way?
Ashish Narain Agarwal and the business of keeping the broker
After IIT Kanpur, IBM and PropTiger, Ashish Narain Agarwal built PropertyPistol around an practical idea: give the local broker better tools. His next chapter takes that network from Indian neighbourhoods to Dubai.
Palash Soni and the business after the applause
Goldcast began with events. Palash Soni kept following what customers did after they ended - a trail from the webinar stage to video, AI and an acquisition by Cvent.
Soham Mazumdar and the value of an unfinished answer
A mathematics medal, Google search, a shopkeeper’s problem, and nine years at Rubrik. WisdomAI’s co-founder has spent his career learning what happens when an elegant idea meets the person who has to use it.
Naveen Tewari and the business of changing your mind
He grew up on the IIT Kanpur campus, where a life in academia seemed the natural choice. From an SMS search service to InMobi and Glance, Naveen Tewari has made a career of spotting when an idea needs a bigger canvas.
Ambarish Gupta and the business of answering the next call
A failed property startup taught Ambarish Gupta to sell before he built. From Knowlarity to Basis Vectors Capital, he has kept returning to a practical question: what does a business need to work?
Dilsher Malhi and the business of one more round
A schoolboy’s pen-fighting tournaments became a career in digital play. After building Zupee around familiar Indian games, Dilsher Malhi is confronting what happens when the rules of the business change.
Amit Agarwal and the price of an introduction
A month’s rent to meet a landlord struck Amit Agarwal as a peculiar bargain. With two friends, the former banker built NoBroker around a question that India’s property market had learned to live with.
Manish Kumar Is Teaching Software to Read the Fine Print
The Lumber co-founder spent years turning project constraints into software. Now he is applying that habit to construction payroll, where every union rule, timecard and job site can change the answer.
Satya Gupta Bet That Good Software Could Police Itself
A childhood in India, a short stay at General Motors and one consequential coffee led the Virsec founder to a deceptively plain question: why chase every attacker when software can be held to its own rules?
Arun Singh Built a Career Around the Question: Who Gets In?
From cryptography research to the CEO's chair, Arun K. Singh has spent more than 25 years turning identity from an IT chore into a business question: who gets access, why, and for how long?
Satish Kumar Is Rebuilding Hiring Around Proof
From borrowed physics notes in rural India to a 2026 deal with Findem, the Glider AI co-founder has spent his career turning one stubborn belief into software: opportunity should follow demonstrated ability, not pedigree.
Kshitij Jaggi Is Turning Oncology’s Back Office Into a System of Action
The RISA co-founder has spent a decade learning that software only matters when it moves work. His latest bet is an AI operating layer built for the forms, portals, policies, and handoffs that decide how quickly oncology operations can run.
Saurabh Gupta
Saurabh Gupta is the CEO and co-founder of Edorer, an AI-powered education platform on a mission to internationalize universities and give students academic freedom to move across institutions, pick courses online or on-campus, and earn stackable credentials. An IIT Kanpur engineer with a Harvard credential, he calls himself a 'Higher Ed rebel' and is building CredX, a blockchain-based global credits exchange. Before Edorer he founded or co-founded TalentGrids (acquired), Talent For Work, Campus to Corporate, and serves on the board of the World Assessment Council, which supports over 100,000 educators worldwide.
Deepak Pathak
Deepak Pathak is the co-founder and CEO of Skild AI, the Pittsburgh robotics company building a single general-purpose 'brain' that can run any robot from a quadruped to a humanoid. A Raj Reddy Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon, he earned a gold medal at IIT Kanpur and a PhD at UC Berkeley before betting that physical intelligence, not language, is the real path to AGI. In January 2026 Skild raised $1.4 billion at a valuation north of $14 billion, backed by SoftBank, Nvidia, and Jeff Bezos.
Manu Bansal
Manu Bansal is co-founder and CEO of Lightup, an AI-powered data quality and observability platform for the enterprise data stack. A Stanford EE PhD and IIT Kanpur alum, he first co-founded Uhana, a machine-learning analytics company for mobile carriers that VMware acquired in 2019. The grind of debugging bad data at Uhana became the seed for Lightup, which now runs hundreds of thousands of daily data-quality checks across petabytes of customer data and is backed by Andreessen Horowitz.
Abhay Singhal
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
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
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
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
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
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.