Our speakers

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

Karthik Jayaraman, Founding team member, WayCool Foods and Products Pvt Ltd

Karthik Jayaraman serves as Co-founder, WayCool Foods and Products Pvt Ltd. He comes with over 19 years experience across engineering, automotive and management consulting, and was most recently heading business transformation, new business development and corporate strategy at Ashok Leyland.

Prior to this, Karthik drove large organizational transformation engagements at McKinsey and Company. He holds deep experience in setting up/ transforming business processes, across operations, sourcing and supply chain, and in organization structuring and leadership capability building.

Lrthik is alumnus of IIT Madras, Purdue University and Indian School of Business.

Karthik KS, Founder & CEO, Avagmah | @avagmah

Karthik founded India’s fastest growing EdTech company in Higher Education helping Universities offer ELITE BBA/MBA programs powered by the Avagmah Technology Platform. Angel invested by K Ganesh (Founder of Tutorvista), Neeraj Bhargava  and VCs eg Network 18, Lionrock Capital, Avagmah is creating a revolution in eradicating bad quality in Higher education in India.

Avagmah helps Universities take their education programs online and laces them with top quality video courses developed in the studios of Avagmah delivered by Leading Faculty who are from the Top B Schools in India, and is delivered to the smartphone of the learner via the Avagmah app. Avagmah is the first and only company to partner with a Central Govt. of India University - Pondicherry University as an Education Technology Service Provider, and counts UCLA Extension - California among its partners. Avagmah has seen a meteoric growth or 15x in student numbers supported by his cofounder Sankar Bora who was ex co-founder Myntra.

Before founding Avagmah Karthik founded 24x7 Learning a leading eLearning Service provider and before that he has worked in leading technology companies including viz HCL-HP, Microland etc. He is an Engineer from NIT Kurukshetra and has completed his PG Diploma in Business Management from Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, New Delhi.

Karthik is a Member of the eLearning Standards committee - Bureau of Standards, Govt. of India and a Charter member of TiE.

@kskarthik

Karthik Narayanaswamy, Co-Founder and Executive Director, SeaLink Capital Partners | @sealinkcapital

Karthik leads operational due diligence and post investment operational value creation at SeaLink Capital Partners (SCP).  He also leads Healthcare investments for SCP.

Prior to co-founding SCP, Karthik was a Principal with KKR Capstone operating out of the Hong Kong and Mumbai offices, where he was involved with operations improvement projects across investments in India. He also co-led KKR’s Green Portfolio Program across Asia, and focused on driving profitable environmental programs in KKR's portfolio companies. Prior to that, Karthik was a Case Team Leader with Bain & Company in India where he was part of the founding teams of the New Delhi and Mumbai offices and focused on performance improvement, private equity due diligence and organization restructuring. He has also spent time with Goldman Sachs Investment Partners in Mumbai and with Capital One Financial in Richmond, Virginia.

Karthik holds a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

Karthik Prabhakar, Managing Partner, PeerCapital

Karthik Prabhakar is Managing Partner at PeerCapital, an early stage tech focused VC fund.

In his previous role where he was Managing Director and Partner at Chiratae Ventures, he has donned multiple hats as global head of fundraising as lead investment advisor in many companies some of which went on to be among the best outcomes for the firm.

A few notable investments as lead advisor include PlaySimple Games (acquired by MTG), Fibe / EarlySalary , NestAway, PlayShifu and others.

He has been part of the Indian tech ecosystem since 2005 with experience spanning engineering, product development, marketing, fundraising, investment advisory and fund management.

Prior to Chiratae, Karthik worked with Intel in their Ideas to Reality team, a technology incubator focused on building IoT products. As a tech marketing person, he played a key role in rapid prototyping, conceptualizing field trial plans and creating Go-To-Market strategies for new product ideas. He has also worked on developing innovative embedded solutions and has co-authored a patent in the area of Wireless Networks.

Karthik Rajaram, Vice President & Country Head, Freshworks

Karthik Rajaram is the VP and Country Head for India Business at Freshworks. He leads the company’s digital transformation projects for marquee customers in the region. Karthik has extensive experience working with both digitally-native Indian unicorns as well as multi-industry conglomerates on the path toward digitization.

He is a thought leader in the customer and employee experience space and helps businesses find the right mix of Freshworks products to realize their vision for delighting their customers and employees.

Before Freshworks, Karthik worked in Akamai, Salesforce, and Microsoft.

Karthik Reddy, Co-founder & Managing Director, Blume ventures | @BlumeVentures

Karthik Reddy is a Co-founder & Managing Director of Blume Ventures, a leading early-stage seed/pre-series A fund based out of Mumbai, India. Blume is today one of India's leading early-stage funds, having invested along with leading angels and peer funds in about 50 startups since its inception in late 2010. Prior to Blume, He was also an active angel investor through Mumbai Angels and continues to serve on a few boards for the group. Karthik's experiences range from financial services (American Express Bank, ABN Amro, Instinet) to media (the Times Group, India) across India and the US. He has earned an MBA from the Wharton School (U Penn) and is an Engineering major from IIT, Roorkee.