india-tech
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Arun Prabhudesai and the language of the next upgrade
He started with a business blog, an installment-plan camera and videos few people watched. Nearly two decades later, Arun Prabhudesai runs a Pune media operation built around a deceptively hard question: will this technology be useful to the person paying for it?
The Delhi Firm Doing the World's Data Homework
Blackcoffer turns messy enterprise data into dashboards and decisions for clients from consulting giants to a national central bank - 110 people, offices on three continents, and a name that doubles as a mission statement.
Wipro’s 80-Year Pivot: From Cooking Oil to Enterprise AI
The Indian company that began with vegetable oil now runs critical technology for banks, hospitals, manufacturers and retailers. Its next reinvention is harder: making AI useful across the enterprise without losing the delivery discipline built over eight decades.
Coforge
The former NIIT Technologies spent years learning the machinery of airlines, banks and insurers. Now, with 45,000-plus people and an expanding stack of AI platforms, Coforge is trying to turn that institutional memory into software that can act.
Tata Consultancy Services
TCS helped invent the offshore software model. Now the $30 billion company is trying to make nearly 600,000 people, decades of client trust and a sprawling product portfolio add up to an advantage in enterprise AI.
Bharat Singh Shekhawat
Bharat Singh Shekhawat is a co-founder and Head of Engineering at Entropik, the Bengaluru-based human insights company he helped start in 2016. He builds the systems that turn signals from faces, voices, and eye movement into measurable read-outs of how people feel and decide, and has spent more than fifteen years designing data-intensive platforms and turning research ideas into shipping products.
Tesseract
Tesseract (Jio Tesseract) is an MIT Media Lab spin-off and Jio Platforms/Reliance Industries subsidiary building India's mixed reality stack: consumer devices like the JioDive VR headset (Rs 1,299), JioGlass smart glasses, and JioFrames AI glasses, plus enterprise XR platforms for training and remote assistance. Founded in 2015 by Kshitij Marwah, acquired 92.7% by Reliance in May 2019, it calls itself India's biggest XR and AI company, reaching 50+ million consumers and 50+ enterprise clients.
Kshitij Marwah
Kshitij Marwah is an Indian deep-tech entrepreneur who founded Tesseract, an MIT Media Lab spin-off building extended reality hardware and software in India. Acquired by Reliance in 2019, Tesseract became Jio Tesseract and shipped consumer XR products including JioDive, JioGlass and JioFrames. A former head of the MIT Media Lab India Initiative, he is an MIT Technology Review TR35 honoree (2017), a Forbes 30 Under 30 (2018) awardee and a TED speaker working at the intersection of AI, optics and immersive design.
Freshsales
Freshsales is the AI-powered CRM product from Freshworks (NASDAQ: FRSH), designed to help sales teams close deals faster without drowning in complexity. Built on the same philosophy that made Freshworks a $900M+ ARR public company - that business software should be delightfully simple - Freshsales combines lead scoring, built-in phone and chat, marketing automation, and Freddy AI into one platform starting at $9 per user per month. Over 67,000 businesses worldwide use Freshworks products, including NHS, Honda, Hugo Boss, and Cisco.
Sathya Sampat
Sathya Nellore Sampat is the General Partner and co-founder of BoldCap, a pre-seed and seed-stage venture fund backing AI-native B2B startups built by Indian-origin founders for global markets. An engineer by training and entrepreneur at heart, Sampat built and scaled a data modernization startup to $3M in revenue before pivoting to venture capital in 2021. At BoldCap, he writes $250K-$1M checks into companies in Data/AI, developer infrastructure, vertical SaaS, and cybersecurity - and goes far beyond capital with Bracket, a proprietary GTM network connecting Indian founders to North American and European revenue leaders.
Pankaj Jain
Pankaj Jain is the Founder and Managing Partner of Saka Ventures, a seed-stage VC fund based in New York City focused on Indian fintech, SaaS, and data-analytics startups targeting large global markets. A pioneer in India's startup ecosystem, he was a Partner at 500 Startups for four years, made early bets on unicorns like Innovaccer (533x) and ShipRocket (240x), co-founded HeadStart Network Foundation, and helped bring Startup Weekend to India before most Silicon Valley investors even knew the subcontinent's startup scene existed.