Our speakers

Karan Sunthankar, Executive Director, Grant Thornton Bharat LLP

Karan Sunthankar, Executive Director, Grant Thornton Bharat LLP

Karan Taurani, VP - Research Analyst (Media), Elara Securities (India) Private Limited

Karan Virwani, CEO, WeWork India

A young, dynamic and successful entrepreneur – Karan Virwani, CWeO, WeWork India has been instrumental in bringing WeWork, a New York based collaborative work space giant and the 5th Largest start-up in the world to India.

With a passion for start-up community and a degree in Business Administration from Kent University, Karan’s responsibilities include driving growth for the new venture, vision and strategy as he aims to democratize the collaborative work space in India. His vision is to find unique ways of building communities and propagating the work culture of ‘Do What You Love’ in the Indian scenario.

A game changer and a pro-community building person, with WeWork, Karan is creating a culture of ‘Do What You Love’, yet shaping and innovating future growth opportunities for the company.

Karan firmly believes in the motto wherein at WeWork, one joins as an individual ‘me’ but ultimately becomes a part of the greater ‘we’! In his role at WeWork, he aims to make it into a place in India which redefines success measured by personal fulfilment, and not just the bottom line. Because, ultimately community is the catalyst!  

Being a dynamic thought leader and team player, Karan has also gained knowledge working as the EA to the Chief Managing Director at the Embassy Group. Further, has also tasted success in the hospitality wing and is the Co- Founder of two companies, Lounge Hospitality and Lounge E-comm, thus launching two successful restaurants in Bangalore, Sanchez & Singkong along with the food delivery app Entrée.

KARAN VIRWANI, CEO, WeWork India

Karthee Madasamy, MD, Qualcomm Ventures

Karthee is Managing Director, India and Israel, and is based in Bangalore, India. Karthee has over 16 years of experience in the wireless and multimedia industries and has worked in product development and management roles at various semiconductor startups. Prior to his current role, he worked as a management consulting intern at Boston Consulting Group and as an associate at the venture capital firm, JK&B Capital.

 

He currently manages and actively serves as a board observer for Qualcomm Ventures investments in Apalya, MapMyIndia, Kirusa and Tessolve. Karthee holds an MBA from the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago and an MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan.

Karthic Ravindranath, Director, Surya PowerMagic Pvt Ltd

Mechanical Engineer with 13 years of entrepreneurship experience in Aerospace Engineering and retail, now working on what he believes is a fundamental requirement for  farmers in our country - Making agriculture sustainable and profitable. Surya Power Magic , co founded with Abhilash is building technology based platform for agri products and services called GOLD FARM. Starting with Solar based irrigation and on-demand mechanisation for paddy harvesting from scratch. He has been the pivotal force in getting our solutions to work in exactly the way that the end customer - the farmer, would want it to work. As we speak SPM is the No 1 company in the retail solar pump space in India. 

Karthik Athreya, Director and Head of Strategy - Alternative Credit, Sundaram Alternates

Mr. Karthik Athreya, Director and Head of Strategy for Alternative Credit, is a financial services professional with over 22 years of experience across principal investing, funds management, investment banking, corporate finance, assurance, and transaction diligence services. He heads Sundaram Alternates’ (SAA) private credit team which manages Assets over USD 225 million in a short span of 5 years, across real estate and private credit.

Prior to SAA, Karthik led the India business of Clearwater Capital Partners, a pan Asian special situations fund since 2007 and oversaw over a billion dollars of investment in India across secured lending, offshore private credit, deep restructurings, private equity, and real estate investing.

He was instrumental in the set up and build out of Clearwater’s high yield Assets-backed lending NBFC platform that built close to USD 400 million balance sheet profitably. Prior to Clearwater, Karthik was a founder employee and a Director of Investment Banking at YES Bank.

He worked as a Director in the Investment Banking business of Rabo India Finance, a subsidiary of Rabobank Nederlands. Prior to this, Karthik worked in the Corporate Finance group of Arthur Andersen and with PricewaterhouseCoopers in their assurance & transaction advisory business.

Karthik Bettadapura, Co Founder & CEO, DataWeave

Karthik is the Co-founder and CEO at DataWeave. He leads the sales and business development efforts at DataWeave. Previously, was a Data Engineer with experience in Web Information Retrieval, Information Management and Extraction, Distributed Data Processing, Scalable Architectures.

Karthik Hebsur, Partner, McKinsey & Company