Our speakers

Hemu Ramaiah, MD, Shop 4 Solutions Pvt Ltd

Hemu Ramaiah is the founder and ex-CEO of the Landmark chain of book / leisure stores. Hemu Ramaiah started this exciting brand in 1987 and created a chain of eighteen stores across the country. Landmark is known for its well designed stores, a wide range of international products and legendary customer service which changed the way people buy in India.

Hemu was instrumental in getting Landmark the ISO certification which was a first in retail in the country.Landmark has a track record of continuous growth in sales and profits over the last 20 years.She also set up the one of the biggest e-commerce sites in books in India called landmarkonthenet.com.

She founded a distribution/import/publishing company called Westland Books to establish the supply chain. Hemu has always been a trend-setter whether in design, technology, concept or product.

She now uses her wealth of experience in the retail space in Shop 4 Solutions her new consulting business. She is a venture partner with TVS Capital funds, a private equity fund specialising in the retail consumer space. She is the founder of an innovative design & interior firm called Ifrieze Design Solutions.

Henna Jain Tatia, Co-founder, StuCred

Heramb Hajarnavis, Founder & MD, Sealink Capital Partners

Heramb is the founder and Managing Partner of SeaLink Capital Partners (SCP), a private equity fund focused on high potential, mid - sized companies in select industries. He is passionate about collaborating and partnering with entrepreneurs to accelerate their growth with global best practices.

Prior to founding SCP, Heramb was the head of KKR’s Indian private equity business from 2010 to 2014 and led the investments in Magma Fincorp, TVS Logistics, Alliance Tires and Gland Pharma. Prior to KKR, Heramb was with Goldman, Sachs & Co. over a period of 10 years where he focused on evaluating investment opportunities for the firm’s global private equity and mezzanine debt funds across various industries. Most recently, he was a founding member of Goldman Sachs’ India office and served as Managing Director and Co-Head of private equity investing in India. Heramb’s prior experience also includes being part of the senior management team at Centennial Communications Corp. (a NASDAQ listed telecommunications services provider that was subsequently acquired by AT&T).

Heramb has served on several committees including as a member of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) National Committee on Venture Capital & Private Equity, the CII Sub - Committee on Issues Pertaining to Foreign Investment in India (part of the National Committee on Regulatory Affairs) and on a special taskforce focused on healthcare financing as part of the US - India Health Initiative.

Heramb earned an S.B. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and an MBA from Harvard Business School (HBS). He was awarded an Aspen Institute Fellowship (India Leadership Initiative) in 2008.

Heramb Hajarnavis, Founder & Managing Director, Sealink Capital Partners

Heramb R Hajarnavis, Director, Private Equity, KKR India Advisors Private Limited

Heramb R. Hajarnavis (Mumbai) joined KKR in 2010 and is responsible for the development of KKR’s private equity efforts in India. Prior to joining KKR, Mr. Hajarnavis was a Managing Director and co-head of the Principal Investment Area in India for Goldman, Sachs & Co. where he was involved in the execution of numerous investments including Mahindra & Mahindra, Sudhir Gensets and TVS Logistics. Mr. Hajarnavis’ prior experience also includes being part of the senior management team at Centennial Communications (a NASDAQ listed telecommunications services provider that was subsequently acquired by AT&T). He has a S.B. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School.

Hetal Gandhi, MD, Tano India Advisors Pvt Ltd

Hetal Gandhi Managing Director, Tano India Advisors Pvt Ltd. Mr. Gandhi is the former CEO for the financial services business of Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services Limited (IL & FS), a well-known Financial Institution in India focusing on infrastructure financing and financial services.

Hetal has 16 years of experience in the entire spectrum of financial services business spanning private equity, investment banking and asset financing. Hetal recruited and managed the private equity team for IL&FS, and has led number of deals and exits. Prior to this, Hetal was engaged in Management Consulting for 3 years with AF Ferguson & Co.

Hetal is a certified member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India. 

Hetal Shah, Director, Deloitte

Hilal Ahmad Lone, CISO, Razorpay

Himanshu Aggarwal, Co-founder and CEO, Aspiring Minds

Himanshu Aggarwal is the CEO of Aspiring Minds, he co-founded in 2008. Aspiring Minds is a global job skills credentialing leader set up with a vision to create a merit driven talent ecosystem and enable efficient job skills matching by crafting credible and intelligent assessments. The flagship product AMCAT, is the world’s most widely-taken employability test helping over 3 million candidates find the ‘right’ jobs every year. Backed by state-of-the-art, research, big data and machine learning algorithms - it allows adaptive, standardized and reliable measurement of generic employability skills (language, cognitive, behavior) and a wide range of functional skills using simulated assessments. With its extensive job-skill taxonomy mapping 900+ job roles, big data around jobs and capabilities, Aspiring Minds enables individual and corporations make the right talent decisions. Aspiring Minds enables job seekers to evaluate their job skills, earn industry recognized credentials and find appropriate career and learning opportunities. We also help companies dramatically improve their quality and efficiency of hiring and are today associated with more than 3000 corporations with more than 100 fortune 500 companies. Aspiring Minds is a 500+ people strong organization with operations in US, China, India, Middle East, Philippines and Sub-Saharan Africa. For more information, log on to www.aspiringminds.com or www.myamcat.com

Prior to Aspiring Minds, Himanshu was part of the research and development team at Network Appliance Inc., a leader in network attached storage devices. Based out of Boston and Research Triangle Park, NC, Himanshu helped design the next generation of intelligent, large-scale storage technology. He holds 8 US patents from his work at Network Appliances.

Himanshu holds a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering from the renowned Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi. He is a recipient of the prestigious NTSE scholarship, a National level scholarship program organized by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) administered by the Indian government.

@himanshu0820

Himanshu Gupta, Joint Managing Director, S Chand Group | @SChandGroup

Mr.Himanshu Gupta is the Joint Managing Director and the driving force behind the S.Chand Group. He finished his schooling from Modern School, Barakhamba Road, New Delhi and completed his graduation from Delhi University in 1999 and joined the family business in early 2000.

He was instrumental in transforming the family run business into a professionally run group by acquiring the best talent and implementing modern practices in the traditional business. Now the group boasts of being the largest educational publisher in the country with revenues expected to cross 100 million$ this year (2015-16). The Group is also diversified into digital and other services by having companies like D.S.Digital, which caters to the school students by providing smart class services to approximately 3,000 class rooms in India and abroad with more than 4,000 hours of digital content. The group has also acquired significant minority in companies like Edutor, which is a educational platform to provide content through tablet and other mediums and also into Smartyvity, which is a stem learning company. They also want to expand into Digital learning through more investments and acquisitions.

Himanshu Gupta was also involved in raising first private equity capital in the publishing industry from renowned PE Funds like Everstone and now recently International Finance Corporation. These funds have helped the group in a new growth path and created history in the publication world. He was also involved in the acquisition of Vikas Publication House and their division Madhubun Educational Books, which is a leader in the Hindi text book space. The group also acquired New Saraswati House (India) Pvt. Ltd., last year, which is the leader in the regional languages and supplementary books.

He envisions of transforming the Group into ‘Total Knowledge Corporation’. For his distinguished contribution to the Indian publishing industry he has been awarded with the ‘Young Publisher Award’ by The Federation of Educational Publishers in India and was the Vice President of The Federation of Indian Publishers. He had also co-chaired the publishing committee of FICCI and is known for his path breaking ideas and innovations for the publishing industry.

Today, the Group comprises of more than 2,500 thousand professionals, 4,000 Authors and 15,000 book titles which cater to the need of more than 20 million students by selling more than 40 million books to more than 30,000 institutions. S.Chand Group is poised to be India’s largest content and service provider in the near future with a vision to be a 500 million revenue company in the content and service space in the education sector in the next 5 to 7 years.