Our speakers

Rahul Deans, CEO, Cocoberry Retail Pvt Ltd

Mr Rahul Deans is an MBA from IIM-Ahmedabad with over 20 years of corporate experience. He spent 10 years of his career with Hindustan Lever in India and abroad.

After that, Rahul worked in Russia and the UK, in FMCG & Retail and then joined Aditya Birla Retail, where he handled different roles over a 4 year period. A stint in Go Airlines then followed, where he headed Commercial operations.

Rahul has been the CEO of Cocoberry for the last 2 years. Cocoberry is an Indian brand and is India's first and leading frozen yogurt chain. The company has been able to turn around its operations and move from a promoter run to a successful professionally run company.

Rahul is passionate about creating a world class brand out of India.

Rahul Desai, Senior Vice President - Treasury, M&A & Investor Relation, Aditya Birla Fashion & Retail

Rahul Desai is currently Senior Vice President & Head of Treasury, M&A and Investor Relations at Aditya Birlas Retail Sector comprising of its Apparel & Supermarket Businesses. He has a rich and varied experience of over 20 years in various capacities including Corporate Finance, Mergers & Acquisitions Treasury, Investor Relations, Risk Management & Legal.

Rahul has over his career handled over 10 successful M&As & demergers & divestment spanning the globe from India, UK, US, France, Sweden, Malaysia, Singapore among others. Rahul led the team for one of Indias largest all cash acquisition of Aircel Towers by GTL Infrastructure Limited in 2010 which was a USD 2 Billion all cash transaction. He was instrumental in the formation of Indias First Telecom Tower Company GTL Infrastructure Limited which was formed out of a demerger of GTL Ltd.

In addition to this Rahul has a rich experience in fund raising from both overseas and domestic institutions & has been instrumental in successfully completing many such transactions. Rahul has done his Masters in Management from Somaiya Institute of Management in Mumbai & is a commerce graduate from the HR College of Commerce in Mumbai. Rahul has also been giving lectures at the Somaiya Institute of Management and the Bombay University on various subjects.

Rahul Garg, Co-Head, India PE, Premji Invest

Rahul Garg is the principal at Premji Invest, Bangalore.  At Premji Invest he is a part of the Investments team looking at PE and Mezzanine Investments with key sectors of interest include BFSI space including transaction processing and payment solutions space, Agri and Food processing, Retail, Domestic Consumption themes and Conventional Power.

Previously he worked at ICICI Bank in various profiles including AGM corporate banking group, Head-Origination, equity linked products, Team Leader - structured trade and treasury products, RMAG and others.

Rahul is a MBA Finance from MDI Gurgaon and B.E., Mechanical Engineering from Delhi College of Engineering.

Rahul Guha, MD & CEO of Thyrocare and President, API Holdings

Rahul Hari, Co-founder & CEO, Satvacart.com | @satvacart

Rahul brings over 9 years of unique experience blended across E-Commerce, Consulting and Technology. In his last role as a management consultant at Ernst & Young (now EY), he was directly responsible for execution of projects spanning Market entry, Cost Optimisation and Business Transformation for Fortune 500 companies and large Government organisations. At EY, he helped one of India’s largest IT/ ITES services firm save USD 10M in G&A cost through rigorous data analytics and optimization models. He also developed the roadmap and executed automation of business processes for several organisations such that these resemble assembly line operations, completely independent of people skill set.

In his role at Cleartrip in Corporate Strategy team, he worked with the CXO team for setting strategic directions, executing the initiatives and managing the business performance on a day to day basis. Rahul’s experience blended across Strategy, Process optimization and Technology (in the Research & Development team at NetApp) brings a unique advantage to the company in linking all pieces of an idea ranging from inception, to implementation to execution. Further, the profit focus ingrained into his DNA while working at Cleartrip and handling the strategy projects at EY bring an added advantage in building a sustainable business model in the e-grocery segment that is categorically marked by wafer thin profit margins.

Rahul holds an MBA in Finance from Queen’s School of Business (in Canada) and a B.Tech. in Computer Science from IIT-BHU Varanasi.

Rahul Khanna, MD, Canaan Partners India

Rahul Khanna has over fifteen years of investing and operating experience in ICT across India and the U.S. Having returned from Silicon Valley in 2005, Rahul has played a key role in the development of the venture ecosystem in India and is well recognized as an active investor in several high growth companies.

Prior to joining Canaan India in early 2011, Rahul was the founding director of Clearstone Venture Advisors, a firm that manages investments in India for Clearstone Venture Partners. At Clearstone, Rahul was responsible for building the platform that would focus on early stage investments in verticals like financial services, telecom, media and education. While at Clearstone, he served on the Boards of Billdesk and Games2Win.

During his time in Silicon Valley, Rahul was Area Director Asia-Pacific at Sonim Technologies. Having joined Sonim during its inception, he was responsible for the company's global marketing and sales initiatives including key markets like China and India. Prior to spending time in the Valley, he was part of the team that launched Hutchison Telecom's mobile operations in India during the mid-nineties.

Rahul earned an MBA in 2000 from the Kellogg Graduate School at Northwestern University. He also serves on the Investment Committee of SONG, a social impact fund sponsored by the Soros Economic Development Fund, Pierre Omidyar and Google. 

Rahul Khanna, Managing Partner, Trifecta Capital | @TrifectaCapital

Rahul Khanna is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Trifecta Capital, India’s first Venture Debt fund. He was previously, Managing Director at Canaan Partners, a global venture capital fund with $4 billion under management. Rahul has twenty years of investing and operating experience in Technology, Media and Telecoms.

Having returned to India from Silicon Valley in 2005, Rahul has played a key role in the development of the venture capital ecosystem in India and has been an active investor in several high growth companies like Billdesk, LoyltyRewardz, Equitas and Naaptol.

Rahul also supports the startup ecosystem by advising early stage companies and making angel investments. Rahul has an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Rahul Khosla, MD, Max India Limited

Rahul Kothari, Business Head, PayUbiz | @PayUbiz_India

Rahul currently leads PayUbiz business. He has more than 12 years of experience in strategy and process consulting, practice development, and business transformation. He has worked across clients in Australia, US, Europe and India helping solve business problems directly impacting their topline and bottomline. In his earlier roles, he led transformation engagements at WNS, was a consultant with Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and software consultant at Symatec. He is a B.Tech from IIT Kanpur and MBA from ISB Hyderabad.

Rahul Kumar, Managing Director, Lactalis India