Our speakers

Kush Mehra, Chief Business Officer, Pine Labs

Kush has rich experience of over 14 years in the payment industry and possesses extensive knowledge of the cards ecosystem. Prior to joining Pine Labs, Kush held leadership positions in Visa Inc., American Express and Citibank, spanning 10 years. Kush holds a Bachelor of Commerce from Delhi University and a Master's in Business Administration, Marketing from Fore School of Management. Previously he was associated with VISA, American Express and CitiBank.

Kushal Agarwal, Partner, Aspada Investment Advisors

Kushal is Partner and CFO at Aspada Investment Advisors. Kushal leads the agriculture portfolio at Aspada and serves on the boards of most of their agri-focused companies. Further, he leads the initiatives on fund raise - both debt and equity for the entire portfolio. Kushal is passionate about working with organizations in their formative phase and is closely involved with portfolio companies in their strategic and financial planning, process implementation, performance management and risk management. His previous engagements include Financial Controller at an e-commerce start up and significant stints at ITC – one of India’s largest conglomerate and PWC. Kushal is a meritorious Chartered Accountant from the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India and a graduate in commerce from St. Xavier's College, Kolkata.

Kushal Agarwal, CFO, Aspada Investment Advisors

Kushal is the CFO of Aspada Investment Advisors which advises Aspada Investments and the SONG Fund - both early stage venture funds focused on agricultural supply chains and technology, healthcare and financial services businesses in India backed by investors such as Soros Economic Development Fund, Omidyar Network and Google. Kushal is closely involved with portfolio companies in their strategic and financial planning, process implementation, performance management and risk management. He currently serves on the Boards of Schedulers Logistics and Allfresh Supply Management. His previous engagements include Financial Controller at Zovi.com and significant stints at ITC Ltd and PWC. Kushal is a meritorious Chartered Accountant from the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India and a graduate in commerce from St. Xavier's College, Kolkata.

Kushal Nahata, Co-Founder & CEO, FarEye

Kushal Nahata is passionate about using technology to solve everyday challenges pertaining to deliveries. With global logistics networks and supply chains becoming the lifelines of sustenance, there is a huge price to pay as a result of operational inefficiencies and blindspots in the system. Starting his entrepreneurial journey, right out of college he started by developing a real-time vehicle tracking system (along with his co-founders) and was quick to sense an industry need - the speed at which they need to digitally transform their landscape. This led to the building of FarEye’s intelligent low-code platform which gave unique customization capabilities to enterprises and reduced the time to go-to-market with the transformation.

Since 2013, FarEye has been empowering the movement of  multi-million dollar deliveries right from groceries to apparel to medical equipment to truckloads of Ferro alloys with end-to-end and real time visibility. With FarEye, enterprises exactly know where their goods are, when they will arrive and in what condition, this helps them achieve cost and resource optimization.

Kushal’s vision is to make deliveries and the delivery experience better by transforming logistics operations in a way that each stakeholder in the supply chain is empowered to make meaningful decisions with predictive visibility. With FarEye, he aims to plug the inefficiencies that make deliveries cost intensive and turn it into a profit center and brand differentiator.

Kushal Pratap Singh Rathore, CEO-Founder, Indifoot

Kushal Sanghvi, Vice Chairman, ICOM India and South Asia

Kushal Sanghvi is every bit the Media Evangelist. A penchant for advertising, media and communications drove him to this industry where he has thrived since the last 22 years.

A large part of his innings has been with media companies and digital/ tech. He sees New Media as an integral part of brand expansion. Globally and across Asia his roles with iconic companies such as Reliance Group, Fremantle Media, Havas Media, The Times of India Group has led to unparalleled intelligence in Media thereby creating marketing success stories for those brands and has been pivotal to scale business and operations for those companies. Someone who has been part of various start up teams and then gone ahead to make them successful ventures in terms of people, it’s clients, defining processes and of course scaling and running those businesses.

At his capacity as Managing Director, South Asia at Havas Digital which he founded in India and went ahead to have teams across the region, he also led the company for its social media across a global committee that was headquartered at Paris and its earliest times also started out Mobext the mobile advertising solutions agency under Havas too.

He has essayed roles in Print, Television, OOH, Content and the invention of interactive television in India for the pioneering show ‘Indian Idol’ for Sony Television in the country. Having worked with over 400 brands in his career till now he always willing to learn more and that’s what keeps him going daily. Has also been involved with the Govt of India too and helped them in various facets of marketing, brand and technology.

Being a creative thinker with a passion for creating products, content, platforms and solutions his most poignant creation being the inception of Rediff.com as a founder member, a tipping point in his career graph.

In his role at the Reliance ADA Group he leads all digital transformation across all Reliance group companies working closely with the CXO’s and has incorporated a digital marketing services company for the Group.

An MBA from NMIMS, he loves playing mentor and terms people management as a stepping stone to achieve targets and has been an active guest lecturer in leading institutes across India: the various IIM’s, IIT’s, NMIMS, SP Jain, JBIMS, ISME, MET, Rizvi, Wellingkar, MICA, ISB, Indira Institute, Somaiya, Nirma Institute, XLRI, FMS, Symbiosis to name a few. He has done his doctorate in consumer behaviour with regards to the impact of the various roles of media and communication triggers. He has also been part of platforms like Teach for India and in his spare time also teaches at various NGO’s, slums and villages across the country as he believes that education is a two way process and a country like India that has its largest population in its youth and also in smaller cities needs to all be trained and envisioned for a better India.

He is receipent of over 50 awards locally and internationally in the domain of advertising, marketing, media, content, digital marketing and technology and has been voted by various tabloids, publications, media like Exchange4media, Afaqs, Campaign, World Brand Congress as being among the top 10 digital marketers in the country for many years now. Afaqs has featured him as among the top 50 newsmakers in media in 2014 and 2015.

Kushal is a regular speaker at various media and marketing events and platforms such as FICCI, IAMAI,  Ad Club, Afaqs, E4M,TFMA, NASSCOM, MIPCOM, Campaign, Adobe, ICOM Global, CII in India and globally to name a few where he loves to champion the cause of media and garner new talent into this industry. Recently in 2014 was one of the only 2 Indians to speak at Websummit, Ireland which is the largest digital marketing festivals in the world that attracts over 70,000 people. Has also spoken regularly at the largest mobile marketing platform at World Mobile Congress at Barcelona in 2014, 2015, and 2016 which has over 1,00,000 people attend in and he was one of the few Indian’s to speak there. He has been part of the jury for various marketing, media, content, television, advertising awards in the last over 8 years. He is also on the board of some leading international marketing and media associations like CEBIT, TFMA, Ad Tech, ICOM Global, GIIFFA, DMAI to name a few. He has also been involved in mentoring various start-ups especially in the mobile, ad-tech, data- analytics, social-media, e-commerce, gaming, media space and has also invested into some of the same ventures too.

In his spare time Kushal loves to read, write, paint and sculpt, dabble in cooking, watch movies, travel and explore the world, meet new people and explore new cultures, hike, listen to all sorts of world and Indian music. He loves all that’s tech and is often always the first to try new technology, gadgets and more. He is a car freak and loves to drive, often dabbles in a game of badminton and tries to keep fit with being in nature and doing his walks or a good swim.

@drkushalsanghvi

Kutty Dutta, Investment Manager, Coller Capital

Kutty is an Investment Manager based in the firm's London office.

Prior to joining Coller Capital in 2006, Kutty was Head of Development at Invicta Capital, a structured finance advisory firm focusing on film finance. Previously, he worked as an Analyst in the M&A team at Morgan Stanley in London, and as a Relationship Manager in the Corporate banking team at Standard Chartered in London.

L. Sajith Sameera, Chief Information Officer, Nations Trust Bank Plc

Currently the CIO of Nations Trust Bank, the most activated Bank in Digital Space in Sri Lanka which include most popular Digital Lifestyle payment platform - FriMi.
Previously Group CIO of Cargills Ceylon Plc - the largest FMCG / Supermarket Retailer / Financial services agent and Dairy Food Manufactures in Sri Lanka.
He was CIO/Head Of IT Pan Asia Bank, Head of IT Systems in Cargills Bank and Senior Manager Hatton National Bank.

Chartered Engineer (CEng), Chartered IT Professional (CITP), Certified Management Accountant (CMA), Member of Computer Society of Sri Lanka (MCS).

He is a Banking Technologist, over 30 years’ experience in the Information Technology field including 24 years in the Banking / Finance sector, specialized in Digital transformations, Software developments / product architecting / systems implementation & system Integrations.

He was ExCo Member of Computer Society of Sri Lanka (CSSL) from 2017 – 2019 and shared his experience in many public forums / events.

Lahiru Pathmalal, Founder & CEO, Takas.lk

CEO- Co founder of Takas.lk Sri Lanka's largest pure play e Com. Previous to takas, have played a role as a consultant previous presidential election in SL (2009). Have done field research in Afghanistan and have worked for 2 sitting Foreign Ministers in SL and Afgh. Have also been a visiting lecturer in International Relations at the University of Colombo and have published research in International Journals. 

Lakshmanan Narayan, CEO & Co-founder, Unmetric Inc

Lakshmanan (Lux) Narayan is the CEO and Co-Founder of Unmetric Inc, the Social Media Benchmarking company. The company's SaaS platform is is a pioneer in the social media competitive intelligence space, and is fast carving & owning a niche for itself in providing unique analytics across social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube & Pinterest.

Unmetric has operations in the US & India, and Lux divides his time between these geographies. He is also a volunteer and co-founder at ShareMyCake.org (a section 25 company), and a director at Vembu Technologies.

A graduate of IIT Madras & IIM Calcutta, the greater part of his 17 years of work experience have been at the helm of startups. The remaining years encompassed various roles in advertising, media and entertainment - at Lintas and Initiative Media, Middle East, and a brief stint at the erstwhile Amitabh Bachchan Corporation.