Our speakers

Harsh Shetty, CEO, Central Square Foundation | @CSF_India

Harsh Shetty is the CEO of Central Square Foundation. Harsh has 16 years of experience in diverse sectors such as education, healthcare, investment banking and technology.

His last stint in education was with his entrepreneurial venture Firefish, an education technology products company that creates online education programmes for students across India. Before founding Firefish, Harsh worked at the Pratham Education Initiative in a variety of roles including leading new initiatives, operations, business development and advocacy.

Prior to joining CSF, Harsh was associated with World Health Partners, where he worked extensively with the central and state governments to improve delivery of health services. He has also worked with Living Good in Kenya and Uganda, i2 Technologies (now JDA) and Citigroup.

Harsh has an undergraduate degree in Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology- Madras and an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth where he graduated as a Tuck Scholar with High Distinction.

Harsh Singhal, Managing Director, CDPQ

Harsh Singhal is responsible for managing relationships with external asset managers in India equity markets. In collaboration with CDPQ’s investment teams, he develops and manages the organization’s strategic and institutional relationships in India to implement its equity markets strategy in the region. He also leads CDPQ’s office in New Delhi, where he is based.

Mr. Singhal joined CDPQ in 2017 as a Director in the Growth Markets team. Previous to that, he was the Senior Investment Officer with International Finance Corporation (IFC) in New Delhi. He led the organization’s investment and portfolio management projects involving growth equities, deb t financing and venture capital activities. He also worked for Boston Consulting Group and PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he worked on various investment structuring, mergers and acquisitions and business improvement projects.

Mr. Singhal is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India and holds a Master’s of Business Administration (MBA) from the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. He also represents CDPQ at the Indian Private Equity & Venture Capital Association (IVCA).

Harsha Bhogle, Indian Cricket Commentator, Sports Broadcasting Journalist, Author

Harsha Raghavan, Managing Director, Candover Private Equity

Harsha joined Candover in 2008 from Goldman Sachs where he was an Executive Director and co-head of GS PIA-India. He previously worked at Indocean Chase Capital, one of India earliest PE funds, and was also co-founder & CEO of a Silicon Valley start-up company.

Harsha is an Indian national and holds MBA and MS in Industrial Engineering degrees, both from Stanford University, and a BA from UC Berkeley. He is based in Mumbai.

Harshad Lahoti, Founder & CEO, ah! Ventures

Currently at the helm of four companies in the Financial Services & Consultancy space, creating and growing businesses is not new for Harshad. He made his beginnings as a Management Executive with Larsen & Toubro, where he was assessed to be a high level performer and selected for their esteemed Management Leadership Program. His passion for finance, however, called him to move on to creating his own investment advisory and wealth management company Intercontinental Investments (2005), followed by Excelman India (2006). Further, with his interest in investment banking and desire to help early-stage ventures, Harshad founded ah! Ventures (2009) and CLUB ah! network (2012). In the past 10 years, Harshad has grown his ventures into reputed, self-sufficient businesses that fuel their own growth.

While his investment banking knowledge gives him an edge in evaluating businesses and investment opportunities, it is his extensive experience in creating super specialised, highly motivated teams and lean, optimised workflows and processes that Harshad is known best for. Harshad is known to be an astute problem solver and brilliant negotiator with the ability to think on his feet, while being meticulous and detailed in everything he undertakes. Among other things, he brings to the table the ability to create and build brands and bring about winning partnerships capable of handling whatever curveball the market throws at them.

Besides his interest in finance & investments, Harshad is also deeply involved as a director with the Ajit Lahoti Charitable Foundation, one of Pune’s leading charitable institutions helping Chronic Renal Failure patients minimize their hardships by better kidney disease management. He is a Fellow Member of Aspen’s India Leadership Initiative, a unique values-based leadership program designed to help leaders move from “success to significance”. He has invested in over 40+ startups till date and is a regular speaker at many startup events in India & abroad.

Harshad travels extensively, loves yoga & salsa dancing and lives in Mumbai & Pune.

Harshad Mengle, CISO, Aditya Birla Group

Harshal Kamdar, Associate Director - Tax and Regulatory Services, PricewaterhouseCoopers

Harshal has more than ten years of experience in advising and assisting private equity, banks, international financial services and other companies in establishing an Indian presence and doing business in India.

He has advised on various regulatory issues / assignments, including  structuring of inbound investments, regulatory approvals for investments and exits, tax advice on cross-border transactions. He has assisted overseas entities in structuring their Indian operations and seeking approvals from an exchange control perspective in respect of many transactions (including where private equity funds were involved).

 

In addition to the above, he has advised foreign banks on enablement of their bank branches in India and made representation during compounding proceedings at the Reserve Bank of India.

 

Harshal is a Bachelor of Commerce from University of Mumbai and is a qualified Chartered Accountant.

Harshil Mathur, Co-founder & CEO, Razorpay | @Razorpay

Harshil started Razorpay after discovering the dismal state of online payments in India. He graduated from IIT Roorkee in 2013 and worked at Schlumberger before quitting his job to start Razorpay.

With an idea to change the way online payments function in India, Harshil quit his full-time job. By early 2014, Razorpay was conceptualised with a vision to simplify online payments. Razorpay is one of the only two India-focused companies to be selected for the prestigious Y Combinator (YC) programme where Harshil and co-Founder Shashank gathered industry expertise & insights from some of the biggest VC’s and entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley.

After the three-month programme at YC, founders and CEO’s of some of India’s most famous unicorns invested into Razorpay’s vision of simplifying payments. These include InMobi, Freecharge and Snapdeal founders, along with internet entrepreneurs & investors Justin Kan and Tikhon Bernstam among others. Along with the reputed investors, the company is also backed by Tiger Global Management, Matrix Partners and Mastercard.

Harshil was recently featured in an eclectic list of 30 promising young Indian talent under the age of 30, by Forbes magazine. While Harshil is a mechanical engineer by degree, he has been coding since his schooldays and has worked on multiple software projects in college.

@harshilmathur

Harshjit Sethi, Principal, Sequoia Capital

Harshjit advises on investments in early-stage businesses at Sequoia India and is focused on fintech, SaaS and consumer internet sectors. He works closely with BharatPe, Freshworks, smallcase, Turtlemint and Vymo amongst others.

Prior to Sequoia, he was an early employee at Dropbox where he used to lead the android product which he saw scale to hundreds of millions of installs. He has completed his undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering from Stanford University where he was a Frederick Terman scholar.

Harshvardhan Lunia, Co-founder and CEO, Lendingkart.com

Harshvardhan drives the primary aspect of business - designing innovative credit solutions and delivering them in the most simple and efficient manner to SMB’s.

He started his career with large private sector and multinational banks in their small loan divisions. Early in his career he was intrigued by passion of small business owners who inspite of being credit worthy were not served by existing lenders. Credit decisions in banks take months. His vision is to implement Big data credit scoring with analytics and artificial intelligence.

He is a Chartered Accountant and pursued his Post Graduation from ISB (Indian School of Business, Hyderabad). In his free time, he loves walking and exploring the world with his wife.