Our speakers

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.

Sameer Grover, Founder & CEO, Crownit

Sameer Grover, Founder and CEO of Crown-it, is a graduate from Delhi College of Engineering. The quintessentially ‘product’ person, has to his credit an extensive experience in creating and marketing software products for large enterprises as well as Small & Medium businesses in US and India.

Mr. Grover has worked at leadership positions in well-known organizations like Apollo Health Street (Heritage), MphRx and Knowlarity, prior to which he was working with Epic Systems Corporation in Wisconsin from 1999 to 2005.

With his tremendous industry experience, Sameer aims to create the largest O2O company in India. His vision of the mobile first Indian society drives Crown-it as a product which is transforming the way consumers behave. He believes in a ‘one app fits all’ strategy that is empowering merchants in the hyperlocal space.

With Crown-it’s current growth rate, Sameer would be successful in positioning the company in 25 cities across India by 2018, with an approximate of 20 million users and driving an annual business of $1.2 Bn across various categories of the discretionary spend of the Indian Middle class. According to him, the capable and hardworking employees of Crown-it are its core strength. The team has independence in deciding on product features, marketing campaigns and ideas implementation.

The keen reader loves to spend time with his twin daughters. He also supports various organizations working towards women empowerment. He actively supports Vividha, a
Rajasthan based NGO that works towards women empowerment and the Stop-Acid-Attacks campaign.

Sameer Guglani, Partner, The Morpheus

At The Morpheus Sameer works with portfolio companies on things like – strategy / product / sales / marketing / boot strapping  / plumbing   & what ever else is required to make the startup kick ass.

Sameer co-founded Madhouse Media in 2004, India’s first organized movie rentals company, which was acquired by Seventymm in 2007. Post acquisition he was Vice President – Corporate Strategy, Seventymm.  In his pre-madhouse avatar he was a hacker for startups like Sonim Inc, Telephia and worked across India, US and Europe.

Sameer is also an independent film maker with film festivals movies to his credit. He loves meeting people, traveling and reading.  Sameer managed to get a B.E. in Electrical Engineering from Thapar University, India.

Sameer Karulkar, Head - EquitAce Capital, Bennett Coleman and Co. Ltd | @EquitaceCapital

Sameer leads the EQUITACE Capital team which now brings the VC/PE engagement perspective for its USD 2.2bn worth Brand Capital portfolio companies to facilitate their growth to the next level and in turn enhance long term value for all stakeholders. EQUITACE manages the full life cycle of the VC fund management process from pre-investment, to nurturing and growing the portfolio and facilitating exits. At the same time EQUITACE integrates the Brand Capital outreach within the ecosystems of Angel/VC/PE funds and also the domestic and global strategic players.

Sameer brings with him over 17 years of rich Investment banking experience in developing and shaping corporate strategies, helping PE funds harvest their investments and grow their portfolios and working on facilitating entrepreneurs shape their dreams globally. Prior to joining Brand Capital, Sameer was a Vice President with SBI Capital Markets Limited where he led the M&A, Private equity team and amongst others was also responsible for developing, building and managing the M&A International network across 40 countries to facilitate growth for Indian corporates and also bring global strategic and financial investors to invest and grow in India. He has also served in the past organisations such as Haribhakti Corporate Finance and Mahindra & Mahindra limited. Sameer is an Production Engineer from Fr. Agnel, Mumbai University and has also completed his Master of Management Studies from Welingkar Institute of Management, Mumbai University.