iit-kharagpur
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Angam Parashar Kept the Team and Changed the Question
ParallelDots began by organizing news, stopped, regrouped and found its future on the supermarket shelf. Through every pivot, its CEO kept one conviction intact: the team matters more than the first idea.
Nimish Goel Bet the Company on Making Celebrity Time Scale
A gatecrashed wedding supplied the spark. A stubborn bottleneck supplied the business. Nimish Goel turned five seconds of fandom into an enterprise bet on video at impossible scale.
Nalin Gupta Built Cars That Drove Themselves. Now He Wants Customer Support to Think for Itself
After taking Auro Robotics from an IIT lab to a Silicon Valley exit, the engineer-founder has returned to autonomy - this time inside the conversations where companies win, lose, and occasionally misplace their customers.
Aman Mishra Is Teaching AI to Read the Fine Print
After low-latency trading systems and enterprise copilots, the Unsiloed AI co-founder found his company in a broken table: the place where flat text loses the plot.
Prashant Shishodia Is Teaching Machines to Hear the Whole Conversation
From a scholarship classroom in India to Google-scale machine learning and a two-person San Francisco audio lab, Shishodia has kept returning to the same useful obsession: make ambitious models efficient enough to matter.
Apoorve Singhal Is Teaching PowerPoint to Notice the Awkward Bits
The Slidely AI co-founder went from autonomous vehicles and visual-question answering to a smaller-looking problem with enormous office gravity: the stubborn, expensive business slide.
Arpit Jain Bet the iPad Could Make Learning Feel Like Play
His first education startup was early. His second began with four classmates, a new tablet, and a stubborn question: what if children could practise hard things without learning to fear them?
Ankur Edkie Is Teaching Software How to Speak
Ankur Edkie spent a decade building systems people rarely noticed. At Murf AI, he is applying that engineer's instinct to a more intimate interface - the human voice.
Niraj Rout Bet His Career on the Inbox
A compiler engineer saw knowledge disappearing inside email threads. He spent the next decade turning that familiar mess into a customer-service system built around how teams already work.
Suyash Sinha
Suyash Sinha is the co-founder and CEO of Exly (YC W19), an all-in-one business platform that helps creators, coaches and knowledge entrepreneurs launch, manage and grow their online businesses. An IIT Kharagpur and IIM Calcutta graduate and former Boston Consulting Group consultant, he first built MyScoot, a marketplace for home-hosted social experiences, then pivoted the company through the pandemic to create Exly. The company has raised roughly $9.8 million to date, including a $6.2 million round led by Chiratae Ventures in 2024.
Utkarsh Sinha
Utkarsh Sinha is the co-founder and CEO of Mochatrade, a Y Combinator (Spring 2026) fintech building a platform for traders outside the US to trade perpetual futures on American stocks with up to 20x leverage, self-custodial wallets, and local-currency onboarding. Raised in a middle-class family in Ranchi, he studied EECS at IIT Kharagpur and computer science at Columbia, worked at McKinsey and in engineering roles, and previously built Martian Wallet from his Columbia dorm room, scaling it to 2M+ installs and a $2B+ transaction volume before it was acquired.
Ranjan Kumar
Ranjan Kumar is a Bengaluru-based technology entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Entropik, a Human Insights AI company he started in 2016 to reinvent the century-old market research industry. An IIT Kharagpur graduate who once headed business at Citrus Payment Solutions before its acquisition by PayU, he built Entropik around Emotion AI - facial coding, eye tracking and voice analysis - to read the subconscious signals behind consumer decisions. He is now building his next venture, DecisionX AI, and describes himself as a three-time founder.
Anuraag Gutgutia
Anuraag Gutgutia is co-founder of TrueFoundry, a San Francisco-based enterprise AI platform that lets companies build, deploy, and govern generative and agentic AI inside their own cloud infrastructure. A quantitative analyst turned repeat entrepreneur, he spent seven years at WorldQuant rising to VP of Portfolio Management and the CEO's office before co-founding the talent platform EntHire (acquired by InfoEdge/BigShyft) and then TrueFoundry in 2021 alongside two IIT Kharagpur batchmates. TrueFoundry has raised $21.3M in total funding - including a $19M Series A led by Intel Capital in February 2025 - and serves Fortune 1000 companies seeking to run AI workloads without infrastructure complexity or data-sovereignty tradeoffs.
Veerbhan Kheterpal
Veerbhan Kheterpal is the co-founder and CEO of Quadric, a Burlingame, California processor IP company building the Chimera general-purpose neural processor (GPNPU) for on-device AI inference. A three-time technology founder with a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, he previously co-founded Fabbrix (acquired by PDF Solutions) and was a technical co-founder of 21, Inc. Quadric's software-first architecture aims to run any AI model without the obsolescence that plagues fixed-function AI accelerators, and the company has raised roughly $90M across its funding rounds while scaling licensing revenue sharply through 2025.
Dushyant Mishra
Dushyant Mishra is the founder and CEO of RapidClaims, a New York-based company building an AI-first platform for healthcare revenue cycle management. After nearly five years in commercial operations at Abbott and two years as an early-stage investor at Together Fund, he started RapidClaims in 2023 with co-founders Abhinay Vyas and Jot Sarup Singh to attack the roughly $350 billion administrative burden in US healthcare. The company automates medical coding, clinical documentation, claim scrubbing and denial recovery across 25+ specialties, has raised about $11 million including an $8 million Series A led by Accel, and grew roughly sixfold in its first year.
Lokesh Anand
Lokesh Anand is the co-founder and CEO of Sigmoid, a data engineering and AI consulting company he started in 2013 with two IIT Kharagpur classmates. Under his leadership, Sigmoid has grown into a 1,300-person firm serving Fortune 500 clients across CPG, retail, healthcare, BFSI and AdTech, backed by Sequoia Capital India. An electrical engineer by training with early stints at Siemens and Procter & Gamble, Anand has built Sigmoid around a distinctive thesis: bring rigorous engineering to analytics so enterprises can turn data into measurable business impact.
Rohit Hiwale
Rohit Hiwale is the co-founder and CEO of Morphle Labs, a Y Combinator W20 deep-tech company building robotic microtomes and high-throughput whole slide scanners for digital pathology. An IIT Kharagpur computer science graduate and second-time founder with prior engineering stints at Yahoo, WalmartLabs and Rippling, he is trying to automate the physical and imaging bottlenecks at the core of cancer diagnostics.
Swamy Vijayan
Swamy Vijayan is the CEO and cofounder of Zafrens, a San Diego biotech reinventing drug discovery by shrinking a 96-well plate down to 200,000 microwells that image and sequence single cells at once. A physicist by training who admits he was driven less by a love of biology than by dissatisfaction with theoretical physics, he is a serial founder whose previous company Omniome sold to Pacific Biosciences for up to $800 million. His stated goal is not a quick exit but a foundation for smart people to do important things for the next 100 years.
Bipul Sinha
Bipul Sinha is the CEO, Chairman, and Co-Founder of Rubrik, the publicly traded data security company he built from a Bihar basement story into a $17B+ NYSE-listed cybersecurity platform. Before founding Rubrik in 2014, he spent nearly a decade as a venture capitalist at Lightspeed Venture Partners — backing companies like Nutanix and Hootsuite — and nine years at Oracle holding 30+ patents in distributed computing. An IIT Kharagpur and Wharton alumnus who grew up in poverty in Darbhanga, Bihar, Sinha turned a contrarian bet on backup-and-recovery software into the gold standard for enterprise data resilience in the ransomware era.
Raviteja Dodda
Raviteja Dodda is the co-founder and CEO of MoEngage, an insights-led customer engagement platform used by more than 1,200 consumer brands. He started the company in 2014 with his IIT Kharagpur classmate Yashwanth Kumar after a failed local-offers app made it painfully clear that marketers had the data but no way to act on it. A decade later MoEngage runs Merlin AI, a suite of AI agents for marketing teams, and just closed a $280M Series F led by Goldman Sachs and ChrysCapital.
Abhishek Choudhary
Abhishek Choudhary is the Co-Founder and CTO of TrueFoundry, a Series A-backed AI infrastructure platform that helps enterprises deploy, manage, and govern machine learning models at scale. A former Senior Staff Engineer at Meta — where he worked on infrastructure serving over a billion users — he left to build the platform he wished had existed at Facebook: one that brings Meta-level AI automation to every enterprise. An IIT Kharagpur alumnus, he co-founded TrueFoundry in 2021 alongside batchmates Nikunj Bajaj and Anuraag Gupta, and has since grown it to serve clients like NVIDIA, Siemens Healthineers, and ResMed, raising $21.3M in total funding.
Soups Ranjan
Soups Ranjan is the co-founder and CEO of Sardine, an agentic AI platform for financial crime prevention and AML compliance headquartered in San Francisco. With a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rice University and career stints at Coinbase (as Head of Risk) and Revolut (Head of Financial Crime), he channeled over 15 years of fraud-fighting expertise into Sardine, which has raised $145.6M and grown to 300+ enterprise customers. Sardine's behavioral biometrics and device intelligence platform now profiles 2.2+ billion devices, making it one of the most comprehensive financial crime databases in existence.
Surojit Chatterjee
Surojit Chatterjee is the Founder and CEO of Ema, an enterprise AI company building universal AI employees that automate complex workflows for large organizations. A two-decade Silicon Valley veteran, he previously served as Chief Product Officer at Coinbase (where he helped steer the company through its 2021 IPO), VP of Product at Google (where he built Google Shopping into a multi-billion dollar business), and Head of Product at Flipkart. He holds 40 US patents and an MBA from MIT Sloan alongside a B.Tech from IIT Kharagpur. In 2024, Ema raised $61M total with backers including Accel, Sheryl Sandberg, and Dustin Moskovitz.
Raj Singh
Raj Shekhar Singh is the Founder and General Partner of z21 Ventures, a community-first, operator-led early-stage VC firm investing at the pre-seed and seed stages across AI, fintech, enterprise software, and healthcare. An IIT Kharagpur BTech graduate with a PhD from UC Berkeley, Singh built his career from McKinsey to founding executive roles at Innovaccer (now a $3.5B healthtech unicorn) before launching z21 in 2022. The firm's $5M Fund I backed 26 startups and has already achieved two exits; Fund II closed its first $20M tranche with WestBridge Capital as anchor investor and is targeting $40M total.
Debanjan Saha
Debanjan Saha is the CEO of DataRobot, leading one of the most widely deployed enterprise AI platforms in the world. A PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland and alumnus of IIT Kharagpur, he built his career across IBM, Amazon Web Services (where he launched Amazon Aurora), and Google Cloud (where he oversaw BigQuery Omni and Dataplex). He joined DataRobot in February 2022, became interim CEO in July 2022, and was formally appointed CEO in September 2022. He holds 50+ patents, is an IEEE Fellow, and a Distinguished Member of the ACM.
Kanav Hasija
Kanav Hasija is Co-Founder and CEO of MeltPlan, an AI-native preconstruction planning platform backed by Bessemer Venture Partners. A serial entrepreneur who co-built Innovaccer into a $3.2B healthcare data unicorn, he now applies the same data-platform playbook to construction — where fragmented planning and late-stage surprises cost billions annually. MeltPlan's tools (Melt Code, Melt Takeoff) bring AI-powered code compliance and quantity estimation to architects, contractors, and owners before the first shovel breaks ground.
Nikunj Bajaj
Nikunj Bajaj is the Co-Founder and CEO of TrueFoundry, a San Francisco-based enterprise AI infrastructure platform that lets companies build, deploy, and govern machine learning and generative AI applications on Kubernetes - in cloud, on-prem, or hybrid environments. An IIT Kharagpur and UC Berkeley alum, Bajaj previously led machine learning at Facebook where he helped launch the company's first on-device model on Messenger and built the Proactive Assistant. He founded TrueFoundry in 2021 alongside two IIT Kharagpur batchmates, raised $21.3M (including a $19M Series A led by Intel Capital in 2025), and counts Siemens Healthineers, NVIDIA, and Automation Anywhere among customers - compressing typical AI deployment timelines from 14 months to under four.
Sunil Patro
Sunil Patro is the Founder and CEO of Signeasy, the electronic signature and contract management platform he built after a frustrating afternoon hunting for a fax machine in Riviera Maya, Mexico in 2009. He bootstrapped the company for over a decade, coded the first version from hostels across Central and South America, and grew it to 10 million users across 180+ countries before taking any outside funding. A former Microsoft software engineer and IIT Kharagpur graduate, Patro has made a career out of making complex workflows embarrassingly simple.