Our speakers

Jm Trivedi, Partner, Head- South Asia - Actis

JM Trivedi is the face of Actis in India. He joined the company in 1997 when it was still CDC, and was responsible for setting up the Mumbai office. Today, he heads Actis's South Asian business.

With over 30 years of experience in the finance industry, including 19 years in private equity, he has led a number of successful investments, most notably Glenmark Pharmaceuticals, UTI Bank, Sterling Hospital, Paras Pharmaceuticals, AVTEC, and more recently IDFC. During his early years in finance, JM quickly realised that in order to add value, you need influence, which, in India, comes through relationships. And so that's what he has proceeded to do build solid relationships over time. His investment style is to leverage his relationships to help investee companies make significant operational improvements post investment, which has now become the philosophy for Actis in India and the rest of South Asia.

Prior to joining Actis, JM was Senior Vice President at Gujarat Venture Finance Ltd. (GVFL) in Ahmedabad, which he joined in its formative stage, helping it raise its first three funds. JM is a chemical engineer from IIT, Bombay, and holds a Diploma in Finance from the Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India.

Joel D'Souza, Regional Channel Sales Manager, Sophos

Regional Head – Karnataka at Sophos, is Seasoned Sales professional with corporate experience of more than 20 years into Channel Sales Management, Market Research, Business Development and Market Intelligence.

John Dougery, Managing Director, Inventus Capital Partners

John went into venture after an operating career with fast growing Silicon Valley companies.  He’s known Kanwal for decades and they co-invested in early stage companies for nearly 10 years prior to founding Inventus with Samir.

John started his career leading channel marketing for IBM, Microsoft, and Intel product lines.  He then went into product marketing and business management at Sun and Silicon Graphics during the growth years of the workstation industry.

John was recruited into venture in 1997, and has since worked with dozens of founding teams resulting in 8 liquidity events including two IPOs to date.  John started in venture with Scale Venture Partners where he was one of the founders raising their first two funds totaling $600 million.

John co-founded Inventus with Kanwal & Samir in 2005 as they saw the emergence of the lean startup model and the globalization of the technology startup ecosystem. At Inventus John’s been a Board Director at Vivu (ACQ: Polycom), Dhingana (ACQ: rd.io), Spotzot (ACQ: Valassis), and Sokrati. He is currently Board Director for Activity Hero, CreditSesame, Resilinc, and SysCloud.  John is particularly interested in new digital marketplaces and services-led technology businesses, but particularly looks forward to working with great technology entrepreneurs regardless of the software or services sector.

A San Francisco native, John earned a BA from U.C. Berkeley and an MBA from the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley. He’s also been a Charter Member of TiE mentoring ambitious entrepreneurs.

John Kuruvilla, MD, GenNext Ventures

John Kuruvilla has close to 29 years of varied experience encapsulating Brand building, Marketing, Sales, Operations, P&L responsibilities etc. with companies like The Oberoi group of hotels, Lowe Lintas, J Walter Thompson and Leo Burnett.

John has been involved with and led several successful brand campaigns like Hamara Bajaj, Maruti Omni, Kawasaki Cheetah, Toyota Qualis, Hitachi Air conditioners and has also won a Cannes.

His entrepreneurial skills include Air Deccan, Propmart and Taggle. In addition, he has mentored several companies to achieve scale.

In his current role as MD of GenNext Ventures, John is working closely with the start-up ecosystem in India.

John is an avid chess player, a voracious reader of biographies, loves traveling and is passionate about ‘Unboxing the box!’

John Mathew, Co-founder & CEO, Riafy Technologies

John Mathew is an entrepreneur, programmer and designer. He is one of those rare coders who can design. He along with his 5 friends co founded Riafy Technologies in 2013 straight out of college. Together they create beautiful pieces of code that make people's lives easier. He is a joint patent holder on relational intelligence; a system used to power their apps.

They launched Cookbook in September 2013. It's a cooking app that let's people discover recipes they would love to eat. In just under two years, the company has received 12.5 million downloads, spanning 157 countries and 20 languages. They're also the first company in India to be honoured with both the Top Developer and Editors' Choice badges on Google Play.

John attended Google I/O in 2015 where Cookbook became one of the first companies from India to be showcased. He is also one of the young entrepreneurs to be part of TEDx.

He and his team believe that technology makes sense only when it can touch people's lives. Hence they focus on building experiences, not just products.

@john_mathew

Jonathan Winer, MD, Nereus Capital

Jonathan Winer is the Managing Director of Nereus Capital, a private equity fund focused on companies engaged in renewable energy generation and clean energy technologies in India. Typically Nereus invests in companies with proven execution capability and strong project pipelines where the use of proceeds form Nereus' investment allows the developer to increase the scale of its portfolio of operating power plants. Prior to founding Nereus, Mr. Winer was a Director of the D. E. Shaw group's private equity practice. During Mr. Winer's tenure, this group invested over US$1billion in Indian companies across sectors and in U.S. and E.U. domiciled companies with significantly cross-broder business models.

Jonathan Wright, Managing Director International, Dow Jones

Jonny Wright was appointed Managing Director International of Dow Jones in January 2016. He previously served as Managing Director APAC and Publisher of Financial News and WSJ Pro. Mr. Wright is responsible for defining and implementing growth strategies for The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones outside the US.

Previously, Mr. Wright was Circulation Director in Europe for The Wall Street Journal, a role he held from January 2013. Mr. Wright first joined Dow Jones in 2010 as Advertising Sales Director for Dow Jones’ Financial News.

Before joining the Dow Jones, Mr. Wright was Publisher and Group Sales Director at Euromoney Institutional Investor based in New York. In 1999 Mr. Wright graduated from the University of Wales – Bangor. He lives in Hong Kong with his wife and two children.

Jose Ramapuram, Director, Orange County Resorts

Jose, or JTR as he fondly known, has played a large role in enhancing the equity of the brand Orange County. In addition to winning Asia Responsible Tourism Award and two other prestigious awards at the World Travel Awards 2009, London, Orange County and their marketing team can rightfully claim credit for turning hitherto unknown Coorg into an international tourism destination. With over ten years of experience in marketing luxury resorts in the domestic and international markets, he strongly believes that the key to growth lies in building brands with a strong equity. Besides ideating and implementing new, innovative marketing ideas like Lifescapes (Currently nominated for the World Leading Digital Online Marketing Campaign by World Travel Awards 2010), he has not shied away from revisiting established brand stratagems. Jose firmly believes that every brand must influence the ecosystem it operates in, and here he has been able to integrate an environmental and cultural conscience within the Group business philosophy by spearheading Orange County robust Responsible Tourism policies.

Jose is a devoted family man, and his evenings are devoted to his wife and three children. Besides being a keen collector of South Indian art and antiques, he enjoys a round of badminton or two, plays the guitar with panache, sings tenor in a western classical choir and boasts an eclectic collection of music ranging from Carnatic/Hindustani to Contemporary Jazz/ classic rock. He is also closely involved with the Church and various charitable causes.

Joseph Rai, Special Correspondent, VCCircle (Moderator)

Juggy Marwaha, Managing Director - South India, JLL

Juggy Marwaha is the South India - Managing Director. He spearheads Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai businesses for the firm and is based in Bangalore.

Prior to Jones Lang Lasalle, Juggy has been with RMZ Corp, leading the office development portfolio for the group over the last 12 years and has worked very closely with the leading Technology & BIFS ( Banking, Insurance, Financial Sector ) Companies of the world setting up shop and their off-shore centres in India over the past 12 years. Juggy has leased over 14 million sqt of Office Space with over 250 lease transactions.

In 2008 he had a short stint with CB Richard Ellis in Dallas as Vice President - Global Corporate Services. He headed the newly formed India Desk at the Dallas City Office, and was responsible for managing key relationships of leading clients in the US who were progressively growing their business lines in India, he returned back on board RMZ as Director in 2008 October. Juggy’s professional experience includes over 10 years in the hospitality and the entertainment sector across India, where he started as a Management Trainee
with the Taj Group Of Hotels and worked with few more startups’ setting up F& B Operations.

He has been part of Corenet Global since the past 9 years and is a Member of India / Bangalore Chapter and learning Programme Committee of Corenet. His last assignment before joining JLL was with Mantri Developers as President where he spent a a little over a year leading the commercial development business for the group after he left RMZ in March 2012. Some of his key clients include : Accenture, Airbus, Apple, Boeing, Cap Gemini, Ernst & young, Rolls Royce, Ford Motor Company, HSBC, Google, Northern Trust Bank, Oracle, SAP, Shell to name a few.