Our speakers

Ravi Gururaj, Chairman & Co-founder, Frictionless Ventures

Ravi Gururaj is a serial entrepreneur with 5 ventures and 2 public exits, an angel investor, a mentor to numerous entrepreneurs, technology executive, and ecosystem evangelist. He is Chairman & Co-Founder of Frictionless Ventures where he is building and investing in innovative software products primarily in the cloud, mobile, and big data segments.

Over his 25-year career, Ravi has held wide ranging roles including promoting an STPI unit exporting software components out of India, product management at Intel, served as Managing Director of the Trilogy Software's India engineering center, and founded multiple successful software product ventures two of which were acquired by public NASDAQ listed US technology companies. Ravi is a member of the NASSCOM Executive Council, chairs the NASSCOM Product Council and co-hosts the NASSCOM Product Conclave. He is Charter Member of TiE Bangalore where he launched the Cloud SIG, is Co-Chair/Founder of the Penn & Wharton Club of Bangalore, and is Co-Founder & Co-Chair of HBS Alumni Angels India chapter.

VMLogix, which he founded in 2004 was venture funded by Bain Capital Ventures and acquired by Citrix in 2010. Ravi received his MBA with high distinction as a Baker Scholar from Harvard Business School. He graduated with honors as Benjamin Franklin Scholar from the University of Pennsylvania in the Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology receiving a B.S.E. in Computer Science & Engineering from the Moore School and a B.Sc. in Finance from the Wharton School. He was also a research scholar at the University of Edinburgh and schooled at La Martiniere for Boys in Kolkata.

@ravigururaj

Ravi Kant, Design Thinking Strategist | CEO & Founder, Innovation Spark Asia

Ravi is a Design Thinking and Innovation specialist from the University of Virginia, with proven expertise in setting up Design Thinking practice and driving the culture of innovation.
Working as Independent consultant, mentor, coach in applied design thinking and design strategy, helping companies across sectors in redesigning their innovation process for product and service improvements, and create a cultural change within the companies.
He has designed and facilitated workshops and Design Sprints at NTPC, Maruti Suzuki, Monotype Solutions, Bobble AI, and 91springboard, to name a few, and collaborated with the Academy of Human Resources Development (AHRD) to conduct Design Thinking Workshops for Professionals at private and public companies, as well as, management students.
In a career spanning over 30 years in Information Technology, he was recently serving as a Business Head at the Royal Bank of Scotland for 15 years, where he was managing Business aligned Technology teams to deliver solutions for Investment, Corporate and Retail Banking businesses.

Ravi Kiran, Co-founder, VentureNursery

Ravi Kiran is a professional business builder, a growth adviser and an active angel investor.

He is the Co-founder of VentureNursery, India’s first angel-backed start-up accelerator. He is also the Co-founder and Managing Partner of Friends of Ambition, arguably India’s first business growth platform for in Middle India - India’s Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns. He is an active investing member of Mumbai Angels and Indian Angel Network.

He is the former CEO -South East & South Asia and Emerging Market Leader-Specialist Solutions for Starcom MediaVest Group [SMG], the World’s largest media network.

Of his twenty year long corporate career, he spent eight years at Lintas India and Initiative Media and twelve years at Starcom MediaVest Group. He has had divisional, country and regional leadership roles, based in Delhi, Mumbai and Singapore. He has built teams and product portfolio, grown businesses and stature for the company, mentored peers in the Middle East, Mexico, Russia, Poland and elsewhere on creating new lines of business.

He also served on SMG’s Global Product Committee and Global Management Group, the company’s apex product and leadership groups respectively.

Since 2003, Kiran has been chairing the marketing committee of the Media Research Users’ Council, India’s premier industry research association. He regularly speaks in industry fora across the region as well as is engaged in teaching assignments as visiting faculty in several business schools in India. Kiran has served on the juries of several industry awards, such as the Bombay Ad Club’s Emvees, the BSR [Business for Social Responsibility] Awards, the AME [Asian Marketing Excellence] Awards, and the Cannes Media Lions.

Kiran holds a Mechanical Engineering degree from University of Kashmir and a Business Management degree from Faculty of Management Studies, University of Delhi.  He lives in Mumbai with his wife Shalini. His interests include technology, behavioral sciences and philosophy.

Ravi Kyran, CHRO, Bajaj Auto

Ravi Maguluri, CTO- Cloud and Digital Services, Sify Technologies Ltd.

Ravi works with Customers on defining their digital objectives to help devise the right architecture and execution plans. He is responsible for service strategy and product roadmap for Sify’s CloudInfinit and InfinitDigital Platforms that enable customers to execute digital engagement plans. He is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.

Ravi Pratap Maddimsetty, Co-founder & CTO, Mobstac

Ravi likes to describe himself as a compulsive technologist‚ with roots in the Linux/open source world, having contributed code and effort to open source projects such as GNOME,  Mono, and libcurl while at college and graduate school. Before founding MobStac, Ravi spent 4 years at a technology startup, Hillcrest Labs, based in Washington D.C., as Manager in its Software Products group, where he was one of the earliest engineers on the team. Hillcrest Labs is where Ravi learnt the ropes of running a start-up as he took on multiple roles in product engineering, customer program management, offshore strategy, and trade show marketing.

Before Hillcrest, Ravi was with Morgan Stanley in New York, as an Associate in its Technology group. Ravi has an M.S. in Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis, and a B. Tech in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras. 

Ravi Ramachandran, Partner Engineering- Strategic Partners, Google Cloud Platform

Ravi Ramachandran 2 decades of experience in global presales/partnerships across cloud, telecom, and OEM sectors. Successfully led partner accelerators and product launches, specializing in building and transforming partners and the end customers in GENAI journey.

Ravi Saxena, Co-founder and MD, Wonderchef

Ravi Saxena is an entrepreneurial CEO and a builder of businesses. Ravi is an MBA from IIM-Ahmedabad, India’s finest management institute, and one of the best in the world. He accomplished his Electronics Engineering Degree from the prestigious Delhi Institute of Technology. He has had 15 years of his 20 years of experience as CEO and MD of major Multinational Organizations in India. He has a track record of launching new concepts and taking them to success.

Having built 11 distinct businesses from scratch, in services sector, he has a solid grip on launching businesses, growing them and creating shareholder value. He has extensive global exposure and has participated in projects and workshops in over 35 countries across 5 continents. Ravi’s passion is Sales, Marketing, Projects and Business Strategy supplemented by strong financial skills and clear HR perspective. He is focussed on execution and is fond of leveraging technology for creating differentiators in the marketplace. He believes in matrices driven quality approach to bring most reliable services to clients, customers and business partners.

Currently Ravi runs his own business in Retail and Management Education. He is the Indian partner of the prestigious Italian University, Bocconi and has recently launched a top-end Business School in Mumbai.

Prior to this, he has an extensive experience spanning 18 years in Services, Hospitality, Consumer Products and Retail Industry, topped with a stint in Private Equity.

Ravi built the Indian business of Sodexo, the 20 billion USD French MNC. As Sodexo’s First employee in India in 1994, Ravi led Sodexo India as the CEO and MD of the company, created a team of over 20,000 people and launched 5 unique businesses in the country over a 12-year career with the organisation. Services like Sodexo Meal Vouchers, Gift Vouchers and Food Services have revolutionized life at work in thousands of organisations in India.

In July 2006, Ravi joined Dubai Based Retail Group – Landmark and launched their Retail Hospitality arm – Citymax with 5 verticals. He built a top-notch team of over 2000 professionals within the 2 years and created exciting partnerships with leading brands to support the expansion of the business. During this period he brought brands like Gloria Jeans Coffees and Fun City to India. He also created a master franchise of Yellow Chilli restaurants by Chef Sanjeev Kapoor.

Ravi Shankar, Co-founder and CEO, Active.ai

Ravishankar has been a banker for 15+ years in leading positions and an Fintech entrepreneur for 10 years. Presently Ceo, Cofounder of Active.ai

Ravi Shankar Pooli, Country Director - S&W India, Sri Lanka & Maldives, Western Union Services India Pvt Ltd

Ravi Heads business for South and West of India, Sri Lanka and Maldives and also heads Domestic Money Transfer for Western Union in India. He has about 18 years of experience and prior to joining Western Union has worked with leading business groups in India like Xerox, TATA and Reliance. He has held leadership roles across domains including sales, business development, customer service and marketing in these companies. Apart from managing the International money transfer business for the region, he has been instrumental in launching Domestic Money Transfer for Western Union in India.

He has done his B.Tech from IIT Chennai and MBA from IIM Bangalore.