Our speakers

Nischal Puri, MD, Brandis Manufacturing and Marketing Pvt Ltd

Nischal Puri is the Founder and MD of Brandis Manufacturing and Marketing Pvt Ltd – a brand conglomerate with 2 apparel, innerwear brands in its portfolio and plans to launch 2 more brands in the near future.
 
Brandis is credited to be first company in the chosen space to be PE backed and is emerging as one of the most aggressively growing company in the category and is building world class manufacturing capabilities.
 
Mr. Nischal Puri has been brand and marketing consultant for some of the leading innerwear brands in India. Mr Puri’s professional stint in Jockey India as Head Marketing witnessed the company launching its primary issue.
 
He has been associated with many retail and apparel brands during the career spanning 14 years. An industry thought leader he has avid interest is contributing to the growth of the apparel, retail and innerwear industry
 
Mr. Puri has post graduation degree form JNU and MBA degree from ULH London and mentors MBA students in some of the leading MBA institutes in India.

Nishant Parikh, Partner, Trilegal | @TrilegalLaw

Nishant Parikh is a partner based in Trilegal’s Mumbai office, and regularly represents a broad range of private equity funds, hedge funds, banks and financial institutions on complex corporate transactions, with a particular emphasis on cross-border transactions.

Nishant’s practice focuses on advising clients in evaluating, structuring and negotiating private equity investments and acquisitions, structured financing/investments, restructuring existing investments, exits with strong experience on implementing exit strategies in contentious or distressed situations, and M&A transactions. Of late, he has been involved in effectively strategizing, structuring and successfully implementing exit strategies for some of the biggest funds and financial institutions in connection with their Indian investments. He has extensive experience across several sectors (with particular focus on real estate, banking and financial services, IT/e-commerce, agribusiness in addition to broader manufacturing and services sectors), advising on regulatory issues that typically arise on Indian deals and negotiating with Indian promoters.  Nishant has acted as counsel on numerous headline making transactions over the past decade.

Nishant’s clients include The Blackstone Group, The D. E. Shaw Group, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, Standard Chartered Bank, Farallon Capital, TPG, 3i Group, Sithe Global, Citadel Investment Group, Nomura, UBS, Black River Asset Management and Citigroup.

Nishant Pradhan, Chief AI Officer, Mirae Asset Global Investments

Nishant Sharma, Managing Director, Kedaara Capital Advisors

Nishant Sharma is a Co-Founder & Managing Director of Kedaara Capital Advisors LLP, an investment advisory firm focused on India. Kedaara enables solution-oriented capital combining deep strategic & operational expertise in focused sectors, consultative approach and global connectivity to deliver superior returns.

Prior to Kedaara, Nishant served as a Principal and one of the core members of the India investment team at General Atlantic (“GA”), one of the leading private equity firms in the world. He has over 10 years of investment advisory experience across financial services (including banking & finance), consumer, information technology and healthcare. He co-led GA’s investments in IndusInd Bank, Jubilant Lifesciences, IBS Software and Cyient.

Nishant sits on the Board of Au Financiers and Au Housing as a Nominee Director. Nishant also serves on the Board of the Harvard Business School (HBS) Club of India and is the Treasurer of the Club.Nishant received an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, and an M.Tech. and a B.Tech. in Biochemical Engineering and Biotechnology from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 2001.

Nishanth Chandran, CEO & Co-Founder, EBS

Nishanth co-founded and launched EBS in 2005. EBS now has more than 64+ payment options with an uptime of 99.999% and less than 0.001% of online fraud in its entire network of 3500+ merchants.

Prior to launching EBS, Nishanth founded Darwin Technologies which was a software consulting firm focused on Internet Marketing, Ecommerce and software development catering to several clients in US, UK & Europe.

With an experience spanning various ecommerce ventures, Nishanth has focused on innovation and delivering great value proposition for customers.

Nisheeth Jankar, Associate Partner, Aon Hewitt

Nisheeth is an Associate Partner in the Strategy Advisory Practice, Asia Pacific region. He is an experienced consultant with varied industry and functional expertise. He has more than 12 years of consulting experience at Aon Hewitt and a total of 14 years’ work experience.

His areas of expertise include M&A Advisory, Organization Design and Development, HR Transformation, Leadership Assessment, Employee Engagement. He has rich experience in managing large scale cross border assignments in the aforesaid areas. He also leads the Human Resource Set-up Advisory Consulting space for India, helping clients to transition smoothly ensuring business continuity.

His current focus areas from a functional perspective include HR transformation and transaction support – due diligence and post-merger integration, performance management design, leadership assessment and change management.

Prior to joining Aon Hewitt, he worked with the Corporate HR team of Jubilant Group handling Talent Development and Talent Acquisition for the group. Nisheeth is certified in the administration and assessment of Hogan and Facet5 psychometric tools.

Nishesh Dalal, Partner, KPMG India Private Limited

Nishesh has over 14 years of M&A/transaction experience including 10+ years of transaction services experience,  where he has led due diligence engagements primarily for private equity funds, e.g., Blackstone, General Atlantic, Carlyle, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Barings Asia, Navis Capital Partners, etc. and also a year of experience on the buy-side, having worked with a private equity fund  (in 2008).

Nishesh is a member of the Transaction Services practise with a focus on Private Equity.

Nishita Baliarsingh, Founder & CEO, Nexus Power

Nita Kapoor, COO, Godfrey Phillips India Ltd

Nita Kapoor, Chief Operating Officer, Domestic of Godfrey Phillips India has the rare distinction of being the only woman leader on the Indian Tobacco Industry’s turf.
As COO, Domestic, she helms management and supervision of all functions of the domestic businesses, comprising Tobacco, Tea, Chewing Masala and Confectionary. She commenced her career as a Management Trainee at Mudra Communications (1986-2002), affiliated to Reliance Industries. Owing to her impeccable performance records, she was sponsored for the Management Education program right at the onset of her tenure and for the next 16 years, she worked on myriad portfolio of both national and international repute. Many renowned brands like Rasna, Vimal, GNFC, Mobil, Nestle, Frito Lay, McDonalds, and Dabur are to her credit. As an expert in the Consumer Products sector, she worked her way to head Mudra’s Delhi branch before she moved on to Godfrey Phillips India in Marketing.

At Godfrey Phillips (2002 - 2012) as Director Marketing, she rejuvenated and energized the cigarette brand portfolio and was also accorded responsibility of CSR, Corporate Communication and Identity. Here too, she was sponsored for the prestigious Advanced Management Program (2008) at the Harvard Business School. Post the program, after a year as an understudy to the then CEO, Nita was appointed as the COO for Domestic Business (2013- present).

As leader and guiding force for all functions including Human Resources, Finance, Corporate Affairs, Legal, Corporate Development, IT , Operations, R&D, Marketing and Market Research, her responsibilities also include overseeing the Sales and Distribution network that has some 500 direct sales employees, 700 distributors with over 8,00,000 retail outlets across India associated with the Company.

As COO, Domestic, she has been working towards expanding the company’s portfolio from a purely Tobacco dominated one to a diversified one with focus on Tea, Pan Masala & Mouth Fresheners and Confectionary. Aggressive business goals and a result-oriented approach have provided an impetus not just to the brands, but also to related areas of product development and operations. Her leadership stresses on organization design and strategy that drives innovation, nurturing talent and building leadership, uniform culture of productivity, transparency and collaboration, and a strong P&L focus and ownership across organisation.

In her belief that a social culture has strong impact on both organization and brands, she has been the key driving force behind conceptualizing and launching the Company’s key CSR initiative – Amodini and encouraging the employee involvement in them. Nita continues to expand her horizons using her immense and enriched experience in the corporate arena to lend her expertise in various industry and trade bodies. As Director of TII, an industry body for Tobacco, Nita worked towards creating a better business environment and advocate for better Industry representations to the Government. She is also a core member of the FMCG Committee of FICCI and is actively involved in resolving issues related to policy & strategy, capacity building and global recognition to the Indian FMCG industry.
Accordingly, Nita Kapoor has been celebrated on Impact’s ‘Top 50 Influential Women’ for two consecutive years, one of her many accolades.

Nita is a firm believer in individual social responsibility and serves as a Non-Executive Director of Muskaan, an organisation working for the intellectually challenged. She is also a firm supporter of cause marketing and believes that a brand can only be sustainable if it is all-inclusive and all-encompassing of diverge strata of society. She endeavours that responsible organisations should work towards the greater good of the society and evangelizes it through her blogs on social media platforms.

Nita is married to Sushil, President  & CEO Technical Textiles Business at SRF Limited and they have a daughter, Aparajita, who is currently pursuing her PGDM at Harvard.

For more details - https://in.linkedin.com/in/nitakapoor

Nitai Utkarsh, Lead FO - Investment Strategy & Chairman's Family Office, Hero FO