Our speakers

Manav Sethi, Group CMO, ASKME India & Findit Malaysia

Manav is Group Chief Marketing Officer & Head Digital Platforms at Getit Infoservices that owns & operates ASKME, ASKME Bazaar, AKSME Pay, ASKME Grocery & ASKME Furniture/Mebelkart in India and Findit Malaysia. He has been instrumental in not only creating digital strategy & platforms for the group but has also launched these while devising overall communication strategy. These disruptive platforms and consumer brands have already acquired near leadership position as integrated offering in local search, classified, deals & marketplace.

Within 6 quarters of launch, ASKME & ASKMEBazaar has acquired leadership position with 14M+ SMEs in searchable database, 70M monthly searches, 1M+ new classified ads every month, 15000+ paid advertisers per month, 15M+ APPs, 100k online SME storefronts with 3.5M SKUs available to be sold. Findit Malaysia was launched formally in March 2015 and has been downloaded 0.5M times with 0.4M merchants online.  ASKME Grocery & Mebelkart has been scaled to 20 cities and formal brand launch of these and ASKME Pay is being worked upon. Manav is also working towards launching Findit marketplace in Malaysia and launches in Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Africa, Kuwait and Middle East.

In his earlier stints, Manav exited a startup in stealth mode that created an IP that helped telecom towers reduce their energy costs. In his last corporate role he led corporate strategy for Reliance Entertainment India and was founder of then India’s largest online local search platform that got investment interests from Navteq & acquisition interest from India’s largest online yellow pages company. While at Reliance, he also worked on launching businesses across FM Radio, Music, Motion Pictures, Movie rental & download, online gaming & a JV with Dreamworks Animation SKG. With formal education in Management & Law, he is very active in start-up ecosystem across India & Silicon Valley.

@sethimanav

Mandar Agashe, Founder & Vice Chairman, Sarvatra Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

Mandar Agashe is the founder and Vice Chairman of Sarvatra Technologies Pvt. Ltd. (www.sarvatra.tech), India’s leading provider of fintech and payment platforms like UPI, IMPS, AEPS, BBPS, with key customers like ICICI Bank and Equitas. Sarvatra has been instrumental in making 500+ banks across 27 Indian states and 3 UTs join the national payments ecosystem through its unique SaaS model. Sarvatra’s EFT Switch won the Economic Times BFSI Innovation Tribe Award 2018 in “Technology” category and was awarded “Best Banking Tech” of the year 2019 by IAMAI.

Mandar completed his BE (Computer Science) in 1990/91 from PICT, a leading engineering college in Pune, and has been active in the fintech industry for the last 28 years. His unique banking technology invention has won patents in India and South Africa. Mandar comes from an Indian business family having generations of experience in various fields like Farming, Sugar factory, Pharmaceuticals, Banking, Steel and many allied industries.

Mandar is also the founder of Brihans Natural Products, whose GreenLeaf® Aloe Vera skincare range is a leading product with natural active ingredients in India (www.brihansnatural.com). He holds a US patent in manufacturing aloe vera products without preservatives.

Mandar pursues his hobby of singing and music direction. In 1996, he was the co-music director with Pt. Hridaynath Mangeshkar for a Marathi film song. His Indipop music videos featuring him as a singer, like the popular song Nazar Nazar Mili Jo Kal (www.youtube.com/mandaragashe), have topped the MTV charts in the late 90’s. He recently released a Marathi pop album with Asha Bhosle, celebrating her 82nd birthday (www.82pop.in).

Mandar Agashe is the founder and Vice Chairman of Sarvatra Technologies Pvt. Ltd. (www.sarvatra.tech), India’s leading provider of fintech and payment platforms like UPI, IMPS, AEPS, BBPS, with key customers like ICICI Bank and Equitas. Sarvatra has been instrumental in making 500+ banks across 27 Indian states and 3 UTs join the national payments ecosystem through its unique SaaS model. Sarvatra’s EFT Switch won the Economic Times BFSI Innovation Tribe Award 2018 in “Technology” category and was awarded “Best Banking Tech” of the year 2019 by IAMAI.

Mandar completed his BE (Computer Science) in 1990/91 from PICT, a leading engineering college in Pune, and has been active in the fintech industry for the last 28 years. His unique banking technology invention has won patents in India and South Africa. Mandar comes from an Indian business family having generations of experience in various fields like Farming, Sugar factory, Pharmaceuticals, Banking, Steel and many allied industries.

Mandar is also the founder of Brihans Natural Products, whose GreenLeaf® Aloe Vera skincare range is a leading product with natural active ingredients in India (www.brihansnatural.com). He holds a US patent in manufacturing aloe vera products without preservatives.

Mandar pursues his hobby of singing and music direction. In 1996, he was the co-music director with Pt. Hridaynath Mangeshkar for a Marathi film song. His Indipop music videos featuring him as a singer, like the popular song Nazar Nazar Mili Jo Kal (www.youtube.com/mandaragashe), have topped the MTV charts in the late 90’s. He recently released a Marathi pop album with Asha Bhosle, celebrating her 82nd birthday (www.82pop.in).

Maneesh Bhandari, Director - Pune Operations, CIIE, IIM-Ahmedabad

Maneesh is an Entrepreneur turned active Angel investor. Started career at Citigroup as an Intrapreneur and launched industry's first distributed computing security product. Founded Identity Management venture SENA Systems in the US in 1998 with offices in UK, India, and Australia, got an exit after 10 years and moved to Pune in 2009. Recently joined CIIE @ IIM-Ahmedabad to expand its operations to Pune. B.Tech from IIT Kharagpur and MBA from Stern School of Business, New York University.

Manesh Mahatme, Head, Payment Acceptance, Amazon Payments

Mangesh Pathak, Partner, Ambit Pragma Advisors LLP

Mangesh is one of the founding partners of Ambit Pragma, a fund with specific focus on offering growth capital to mid-market firms in select industry verticals.

In his 20 years of professional career, Mangesh has worked with companies like Asian Paints, Reliance Infocomm and GSK Pharmaceuticals in various supply chain roles before co-founding Ambit Pragma.

Mangesh leads the investments in the Logistics sector for the fund.

During last 8 years, Ambit Pragma has made 7 investments, 3 of which are in the logistics field.

Mangesh is an MBA from S. P. Jain and an Engineering graduate in Electronics and Telecommunications.

Mani James, Chief Business Officer, Mosaic Digital - A HT Media Group Company (Moderator)

Mani Mamallan, Founder, Electronics Payments and Services

Mani Mamallan started his career in the banking domain with Punjab National Bank and moved over to UTI (now Axis Bank). Prior to joining C-EDGE Technologies Ltd, a JV of TCS and SBI, he was Vice President and Head of FSSNeT, the services arm of M/s. Financial Software and Systems.  Here, he spearheaded activities in the payments systems domain including, but not limited to, securing accounts like Bank of Maharashtra, where he bagged the mandate for deployment of 350+ ATMs on an outsourcing model for the Bank. Prior to FSS, he was the COO of India Switch Company (ISC) where he was instrumental in introducing new services, setting up the first shared ATM network in India and introducing the first ever ATM outsourcing in India. Prior to ISC, he was a Senior Manager at UTI Bank, where his achievements include setting up the Bank’s ATM Switch, IP network etc.

He is known for his deep knowledge in the retail technology banking space, including the microfinance domain. He commands respect for his Business acumen, strategy and vision among professionals, peers and even among the present CMD’s of Public and Private sector Banks.

He graduated from Madras University and completed his post graduation in Communications and Networking from National Centre for Software Technology (NCST).

Mani S G, COO & President, Ashok Leyland

Manik Arora, Founder & MD, IDG Ventures India Advisors Pvt Ltd

Mr. Manik Arora is Founder & Managing Director of IDG Ventures India Advisors. IDG Ventures manages over US$6 Billion globally and has a portfolio of over 200 technology companies. Manik currently serves on the Board of Directors at Vserv Digital, Brainbees (Firstcry.com), Ozone Media and Sourcebits Technologies. He has over 16 years of industry experience, including 8 years of venture investing experience.

 

Prior to IDG Ventures, Manik was at Battery Ventures in Silicon Valley where he led the firm's India practice and worked with General Atlantic in Singapore. At Battery and GA, he worked on India technology investments such as Travelguru (acquired by Travelocity) and Patni Computers (IPO).

 

Manik was part of the founding management team at GA-backed i-DNS.net International, the global leader in multilingual Internet DNS technology. Previously, Manik managed global outsourcing initiatives for American Express in New York and ran sales and marketing for MasterCard in Singapore. His early career was at The Boston Consulting Group in India and South East Asia advising clients on strategy, operations and organizational building.

 

In 2012, Manik was named on the ‘Digirati’ list of Top 25 Powerful People in Indian Digital Business. He is a Kauffman Fellow at the Center for Venture Education and a Charter Member of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE). Manik holds a Bachelors degree in Economics from Swarthmore College where he received a McCabe Fellowship to pursue his MBA from the Sloan School of Management at MIT.

Manik Nangia, Director & Chief Digital Officer, Max Life Insurance

Manik leads Digital Transformation, E commerce sales, Marketing and Product Management for Max Life. Max Life is India’s 4th largest Life Insurance Company and has been on a steady growth path for the last half decade (having grown at 28% in the fiscal FY 17).

Along with a passionate team, Manik works to understand consumer behavior and tailor intuitive journeys to create value in core business of life insurance. They deploy process and digital capabilities to improve how the company attracts and services customers for greater life time value. They are tasked to innovate to discover value from new frontiers through customer experience, Proposition design and a combination of these to tell compelling stories in the Indian marketplace.

Manik has 18+ years of experience of which the last 12 have been with Max Life. In these years he has worked in a variety of roles spanning from sales to product management. In his last role as the strategy leader, Manik set up Business Analytics as a center of excellence, contributing immensely to all areas of the business value chain.

Manik is passionate about attracting and developing talent and relentlessly pursues excellence in each part of the business that he has been responsible for. A management graduate from IMT Ghaziabad, he has worked in financial services with the ICICI group (consumer banking and Life Insurance), ABN AMRO Bank.