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?
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.
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.
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.