iit-madras
(22)
Sayan Mitra Is Teaching AI the Instincts That Chip Engineers Keep in Their Heads
The Atrisa co-founder left semiconductor research to tackle a stubborn engineering bottleneck: analog circuits still depend on judgment that is learned slowly, shared unevenly and rarely written down.
Tanmai Gopal Is Teaching Company Data to Join the Conversation
He spent years removing the repetitive work between developers and data. Now the Hasura co-founder is betting that useful workplace AI begins with shared context, careful permissions and fewer heroic acts of copy-and-paste.
Deepti Yenireddy Is Teaching AI to Read the Physical World
From oil-field instruments to construction drawings, the Boon founder has spent two decades turning stubborn, real-world data into software people can inspect, correct and trust.
Adhityaa Chandrasekar
Adhityaa Chandrasekar is the founder and CEO of Subtrace (YC W25), a zero-code network tracer that acts like an inspect-element button for backend infrastructure. Using eBPF, Subtrace surfaces every HTTP request a process sends and receives in real time, with no root privileges or code changes. Before Subtrace, Adhityaa was a software engineer at Google working on Kubernetes internals and GKE infrastructure monitoring, and he built Commento, a popular open-source, privacy-first comments platform. He studied at IIT Madras and the University of Waterloo, and co-founded Subtrace with Sachin Sridhar, a friend of more than a decade.
Chirag Jain
Chirag Jain is the co-founder and CEO of Get My Parking, a smart parking technology company he started in 2015 with Rasik Pansare after the two met on the Jagriti Yatra train journey across India. An IIT Madras graduate who spent two years in the automotive industry, Jain set out to digitize the largely unorganized parking sector with affordable, white-labeled, IoT-driven software. Under his leadership Get My Parking has grown to serve tens of millions of parking transactions across more than a dozen countries, raised multiple rounds of venture funding, and pushed into AI-powered products like license plate recognition and the AVA voice support agent. He was named to Business World's Disrupt 40 Under 40 in 2017.
Siva Lakshmanan
Siva Lakshmanan is the CEO of DeepHow, a Detroit-based AI company that turns tribal shop-floor know-how into searchable, multilingual training video. He joined in November 2024 after running Antuit.ai through its acquisition by Zebra Technologies. His pitch is unglamorous by design: preserve the expertise of the retiring half of the manufacturing workforce before it walks out the door.
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.
Rajiv Ramaswami
Rajiv Ramaswami is the President and CEO of Nutanix, the San Jose-based hybrid multicloud software company. An optical networking PhD who built a 30-year career at IBM Research, Nortel, Cisco, Broadcom and VMware before taking the top job at Nutanix in December 2020, he holds 36 patents and is a Fellow of the IEEE.
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.
Vidhya Srinivasan
Vidhya Srinivasan is VP and General Manager of Advertising & Commerce at Google, overseeing a portfolio responsible for over $66 billion in quarterly revenue. A computer science graduate of IIT Madras and Georgia Tech, she spent a decade at IBM and several years at AWS - where she scaled Amazon Redshift into the cloud's fastest-growing data warehouse - before joining Google in 2019. At Google she has spearheaded AI-first advertising products including Performance Max, agentic shopping via Google's Universal Cart, and the integration of Gemini across search and shopping surfaces. She is one of the most consequential voices shaping how AI rewires digital advertising.
Jeyappragash Jj
Jeyappragash 'JJ' Jeyakeerthi is the co-founder and CTO of Tetrate, the company that made Istio enterprise-ready and brought FIPS-verified service mesh to regulated industries including the US federal government. An IIT Madras graduate who once ran Twitter's Cloud Infrastructure, JJ co-founded Tetrate in 2018 with Varun Talwar to secure the cloud-native stack from edge to datacenter - building one of the most technically credible teams in the service mesh ecosystem, trusted by the US Air Force and some of the world's largest enterprises.
Pandian Gnanaprakasam
Pandian Gnanaprakasam is the CEO and co-founder of ORDR, a Santa Clara-based cybersecurity company specializing in IoT, OT, and IoMT security with $94M in funding. A serial entrepreneur with 20+ years in networking and security, he previously co-founded Aruba Networks — acquired by HPE for $3 billion in 2015 — and led engineering at Cisco's multi-billion-dollar Wi-Fi business. At ORDR, he returned as CEO in March 2025 to spearhead the evolution of the ORDR AI Protect platform, which provides agentless device discovery, AI-driven risk scoring, and automated zero-trust policy enforcement across millions of connected devices in healthcare, manufacturing, and critical infrastructure.
Raghuveer Kancherla
Raghuveer Kancherla is the Co-Founder of Sprinto, a fast-growing compliance automation platform that helps SaaS companies earn security certifications like SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA faster and with far less manual effort. A mechanical engineer by training from IIT Madras turned software entrepreneur, Raghuveer previously co-founded and served as CTO of RecruiterBox - a bootstrapped applicant tracking system that grew to 2,500+ customers before being acquired. At Sprinto, he and co-founder Girish Redekar have built a platform trusted by 3,000+ companies across 75 countries, raised $31.5M in funding including a $20M Series B led by Accel in 2024, and grown the team from 6 to 300+ employees. An emerging thought leader on AI governance, Raghuveer is known for his conviction that 'a growing market trumps having a better product' and his systems-first approach to both engineering and team management.
SK Ganapathi
Dr. Srinivasan 'KG' Ganapathi is the founder and CEO of Vimaan Robotics, a Silicon Valley AI company deploying computer vision and machine learning to bring 100% inventory accuracy to warehouses. A serial entrepreneur with nearly 50 patents spanning magnetic recording, MEMS sensors, and supply chain digitization, Ganapathi previously founded Fidelica Microsystems (acquired by Lenovo) and Verreon Inc. (acquired by Qualcomm). With Vimaan, he is transforming how the world's largest 3PLs, retailers, and Fortune 10 companies track goods from dock to shelf - and became the first computer vision startup to receive investment from Amazon's $1 billion Industrial Innovation Fund.
Sandeep Bhadra
Sandeep Bhadra is a General Partner at Vertex Ventures US, a $150M early-stage fund focused on B2B software, cloud infrastructure, and developer tools. A Ph.D. engineer turned venture capitalist, he joined Vertex in 2017 as a founding team member after stints at Menlo Ventures and Cisco's corporate development. He's known for concentrated, high-conviction bets - typically 1-2 new investments per year - in companies like Hasura, Docker, Tulip Interfaces, and Gitpod. His background spans semiconductor engineering at Texas Instruments, $425M in cloud M&A at Cisco, and founding-team work that contributed to the creation of Barefoot Networks (later acquired by Intel). He grew up in India, where watching mobile telephony disrupt landline bureaucracy first showed him how software could leapfrog legacy systems.
Arvind Parthasarathi
Arvind Parthasarathi is the Founder and CEO of CYGNVS, a cybersecurity SaaS platform that serves as the out-of-band command center for cyber crisis readiness and response. A serial entrepreneur with over two decades in Silicon Valley, Arvind previously founded Cyence (acquired by Guidewire Software) and led YarcData (acquired by Cray/HPE) and held SVP roles at Informatica. CYGNVS emerged from stealth in January 2023 with a $55M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, and serves 2,500+ enterprise organizations with playbooks, tabletop simulations, and automated regulatory reporting.
Jayant Kulkarni
Jayant Kulkarni is the CEO and co-founder of Quartzy, the world's leading lab management platform serving over 400,000 researchers across 25,000+ organizations. A PhD-trained control systems engineer from Cornell University and alumnus of IIT Madras, Kulkarni co-founded Quartzy in 2011 after completing a Swartz Fellowship at Columbia University's Center for Theoretical Neuroscience. The company - named after the highest-scoring word in Scrabble - went through Y Combinator's Summer 2011 batch and has grown into a vertically integrated procurement and inventory platform for life sciences, raising $23 million in April 2026 from Avenue Capital Group and BroadOak Capital Partners.
Kannan Muthukkaruppan
Kannan Muthukkaruppan is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Yugabyte, the company behind YugabyteDB — a PostgreSQL-compatible distributed SQL database built for cloud-native applications at global scale. A gold medalist from IIT Madras and UC Berkeley alumnus, Kannan spent 13 years at Oracle (PL/SQL compiler) and Facebook (scaling HBase for billions of users) before co-founding Yugabyte in 2016. Under his technical leadership, Yugabyte raised $298M in funding, achieved unicorn status at a $1.3B valuation, and built one of the most respected open-source distributed databases in the industry.
Rajesh Swaminathan
Rajesh Swaminathan is a Partner at Khosla Ventures, where he backs bold founders reinventing how the world powers, builds, and heals itself. With two decades of deep-tech investing experience spanning Bell Labs, Deutsche Bank, Applied Materials' venture arm, and now one of Silicon Valley's most storied VC firms, he leads investments across renewables, industrial decarbonization, advanced manufacturing, critical minerals, compute infrastructure, and the intersection of all of these with AI. A chemical engineer by training who was awarded the President of India Medal at IIT Madras and later earned an MBA from Harvard, Rajesh brings rare depth - scientific rigor, financial discipline, and operational empathy - to backing the founders who will, as he puts it, 'save the world.'
Samuel Joseph
Samuel Joseph is the Co-Founder and CEO of Hakimo, a San Francisco-based AI security platform that uses computer vision and generative AI to autonomously monitor physical security infrastructure - cameras, badge readers, access control systems - in real time. A Stanford PhD and IIT Madras gold medalist (President's Medal for topping the entire graduating batch of 2016), Joseph built Hakimo to solve a deceptively simple problem: security teams drowning in false alarms. The company has raised $20.5M in total funding, including a $10.5M Series A in March 2025, and protects 400+ properties across self-storage, construction, automotive, higher education, and corporate sectors - saving customers roughly $125,000 per year compared to a human security guard.
Aravind Srinivas
Aravind Srinivas is the co-founder and CEO of Perplexity AI, the citation-backed AI answer engine that reached a $21B+ valuation in under three years. Born in Chennai in 1994, he earned a dual degree from IIT Madras before completing a PhD at UC Berkeley, then worked as a researcher at OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google Brain before founding Perplexity in 2022. India's youngest billionaire at 31, he has positioned Perplexity as a direct challenger to Google Search by insisting that every AI-generated answer carry verifiable citations - a principle he lifted straight from academic paper standards.
Sundeep Peechu
Sundeep Peechu is a Managing Partner and founding member of Felicis Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's most consistent early-stage VC firms. A former IIT Madras engineer who went through Intel before pivoting to venture capital, he has backed transformational companies including Plaid, Canva, Notion, Cruise, Runway, and Mercor. Known for a decade-plus holding philosophy, hands-on founder support, and a particular obsession with AI and health tech, he has helped guide Felicis from a $41M debut fund in 2010 to a $900M Fund X in 2025.