Our speakers

Salil Pitale, Jt. MD & Co-CEO, Axis Capital Ltd.

Salil has over 24 years of experience across Investment Banking, Corporate Banking, Project Finance, and Equity Research. His experience includes over 18 years with Axis Capital / Axis Bank, where he has built corporate relationships and led multiple sector practices in Investment Banking. He is a Computer Engineer from VJTI, Mumbai, and an MBA from IIM, Lucknow.

Salman Hussain, VP - BD & MD, India & Middle East, Vuclip

Salman has over 10 years experience in the mobile media space. He runs business development and strategy in India for Vuclip. Prior to Vuclip, he worked for Verisign, Al Ebda IT, and Electronics for Imaging.
 
Salman holds a BS from Aligarh Muslim University.

Saloni Nangia, Senior Vice President, Technopak

Saloni Nangia is Vice President (Retail & Consumer Products) at Technopak, one of India’s leading management consulting organisations, specialised in retail, consumer products, fashion, healthcare, hospitality and consumer insights. Technopak is currently working closely with the Indian travelling consumer, travel retail and new airport developments in India.

Over the last 13 years, Saloni has worked in the areas of business strategy and India entry strategy with a wide range of Indian and International clients. She has worked on consumer insights, market research, business planning, strategy and implementation for consumer products and retail for clients in India, Asia, Europe and North America.

Saloni has a Master’s Degree in International Business from the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, New Delhi and is a Science Graduate from Lucknow University, India.

Sam Santhosh, CEO & Chairman, MedGenome Labs Pvt Ltd

Mr Sam Santhosh is an entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience in initiating and running successful businesses.

Sam is currently the Chairman and CEO of MedGenome Inc - a genomics-based research and diagnostics  company delivering the best of health care by decoding genetic information contained in an individual’s genome. MedGenome is the first mover and market leader in genomics-based diagnostics and research from India with international  offices in San Francisco and Boston.

Sam is an investor and mentor for many companies and is currently a board member at Impelsys Inc, New York, ePay Healthcare, San Francisco, SciGenom Labs, Cochin, Emerge Ventures, Singapore and the Centre for Commercialization of Antibodies (CCAB) Toronto, Canada

Prior to this Sam was the CEO and Managing Director of California Software Limited (Calsoft) from 1992 - Feb 2012. He founded Calsoft in 1992 and under Sam's vision Calsoft rapidly grew from a niche player in the Silicon Valley to a global player with over 1200 employees and presence in 8 countries. Sam took Calsoft public and listed  the company in the Indian Stock Exchanges. From 2004 to 2009, Sam focused on inorganic growth through eight acquisitions including companies in U.S, UK, Japan and India. Post 2009, he oversaw the sale of the Calsoft group companies to different buyers across the world.

He has been constantly retooling himself and has attended various training programs in different U.S universities including MIT. In 2010, he completed the Executive Education program at the Singularity University in Sunnyvale, California. Sam has an engineering degree and an MBA (majoring in Management Information Systems) from India's premier institute, IIM Calcutta.

Samar Singla, Founder and CEO, Jugnoo

Mr. Samar Singla, Founder and CEO of Jugnoo is a serial entrepreneur. An alumnus of IIT Delhi and a Physicist by education, Mr. Singla sold his first company, Prodigy foods and followed it with his second venture Click Labs, a profitable SaaS technology solution provider. Jugnoo, his third venture, aims to be an instant on-demand mate for all the daily needs of its customers and uplift millions of people socially and economically by providing them better income and life quality.

@samarsingla

Samarth Kholkar, Cloud Ecosystem Sales Leader, IBM India/SA

Samarth Kholkar, Leads Cloud Ecosystem Sales for IBM India/South Asia. He is responsible for leading development and execution of the region's Cloud Ecosystem organization. Cloud is a key strategic initiative for IBM globally.

Samarth is involved in Planning & Developing Joint Go to Market for Tech StartUps, ISVs & Born on the Web organizations with Key focus on fast growth industries like Media, E-commerce & IT/ITES Companies.

Samarth has a total experience of over 10 years in Sales & Marketing. At IBM, he has led multiple transformational deals from business development stage to closure in new technologies like Analytics, Mobility & Cloud. He has worked extensively in the Indian SMB space and driven multiple initiatives for IBM within the same.

He started his career as an Entrepreneur and continues to work very closely with the StartUp Ecosystem in India. Samarth is an Engineering graduate from University of Pune and holds an MBA in Marketing.

Samay Kohli, CEO, Grey Orange Robotics

Samay is the Co-founder and CEO of Grey Orange, a fast-growing hardware startup that’s disrupting a deeply unorganized industry, Warehousing. His team is building an army of thousands of robots (called Butlers) to take over the warehouses and distribution centers.

Grey Orange is venture backed by some of the very best Venture firms (Tiger Global and Blume Ventures), angel investors, and an advisory panel of technical experts and entrepreneurs who have led billion dollar companies.

Samay has been a keynote speaker at several prominent conferences including Nasscom’s Engineering Summit and CII Innovation Summit.

Samay Kohli is an alumnus of BITS Pilani, has completed his degree in Economics and Mechanical Engineering. Before co-founding Grey Orange, Samay was the Team Lead of Team AcYut that had created India’s first Humanoid that won several medals at RoboGames (San Francisco).

Apart from his technical know-how Samay has helped the BITS Pilani team win a number of accolades and has also reprented India at various countries such as USA, Japan, S.Korea, Germany etc.

Sameer Garde, President, Philips Healthcare, South Asia

Mr. Sameer Garde is President - South Asia- Philips Healthcare. He is a proven business leader with over 24 years of experience in building and managing both small and established businesses in India, Europe, USA and Asia. He has worked in 3 countries and has run global and regional ( Asia) businesses.

Prior to joining Philips, he helped Samsung setup the enterprise business for Samsung India from scratch, and put it on the path to aggressive growths. He served as the President and MD for Dell India where he consolidated and stabilized the consumer and enterprise business for the company. During his 9-year stint with the company in many sales and management leadership roles, he has been instrumental in growing the Dell business in India making it the No.1 Hardware vendor in the country.

He has also been associated with Whirlpool, Pepsi and Nestle. In 2009, the Great CIO social network of Asia rated Sameer as one of the top 10 Technology Leaders in India. He is a Mechanical Engineer from IIT - Delhi and an MBA in Finance and Marketing from IIM - Kolkata. His leadership style is influencing people with new ideas, being infectiously passionate and generating innovative concepts from all levels. He is a sports lover , more playing than watching, and has recently set sights on participating in a half marathon.

Sameer Garde, Independent Director, Capillary Technologies; ex- President Cisco India

Sameer is a seasoned industry veteran with marketing, sales, strategy, general management, and operations experience in leading several billion-dollar businesses across information technology, healthcare, FMCG, and consumer electronics/durables.

With over 30 years of experience, he has held several leadership roles, including the CEO role for the last 12 years, across top-performing organizations. He has a proven track record of transforming operations and cultures to drive growth at scale while focusing on costs and profitability. He has worked in diverse markets across Asia, Europe, and the US and has managed numerous high-performing teams.

Taking an open and honest approach to effective leadership, Sameer leads by example with profound customer focus and detail orientation while continuously emphasizing on improving teams' accountability.

Most recently, he served as President of Cisco's India and SAARC theatre, where he was responsible for strategy, sales, engineering, operations, and strategic investments for long-term growth in the theatre. With his keen understanding of technology and market transitions, he led the Cisco India & SAARC team to high performance and growth while attracting the best talent in the industry.

Sameer believes in balancing passion, purpose, and profit and is deeply committed to wielding technology to shape a more inclusive and equitable future for all at scale. At various stages in his career, he has partnered with many government agencies, industry bodies, non-profits, venture capitalists, and start-ups to catalyze several digital transformation and community initiatives to improve efficiency and access in critical sectors like healthcare, agriculture, education, connectivity, and governance.

Sameer has been an elected member of the NASSCOM Executive Council for the last 2 terms, and has co-chaired the IOT/AI COE with the MEITY secretary , driven the Cyber internship program for 20K students in partnership with AICTE and NASSCOM, been a member of the Governing Council for the Sector Skill Council ( SSC) and a member of the Finance Accounting Council of NASSCOM.

Sameer holds an engineering degree from IIT Delhi and an MBA from IIM Kolkata.

He loves being physically active through long-distance running or riding and is also an amateur birding enthusiast.

Sameer Gautam, Founder & CEO, Rank Junction Pvt. Ltd.

Sameer is an innovative Entrepreneur with 16 years of work experience. Always applying new ideas at work, he has a very successful performance record in Sales and has managed large sales teams. After working with ICICI Prudential Life Insurance as Managing Partner and Jayaswals Neco Ltd. as Regional Manager - Sales, he started his entrepreneurial journey in 2008 as a cofounder and CEO of Anannya eLearning Solutions Pvt. Ltd. (2008-2010). As a result of his efforts, more than 1.5 lac Insurance agents were trained on Anannya's IRDA approved eLearning portal.

Sameer is responsible for Marketing, Sales and Strategy at Rank Junction. He is B.Sc. & MBA from Nagpur University. He is an active member of TiE Nagpur.