Our speakers

Roopa Ambekar, Founder, Managing Director, Uber Medspa & Style Lounge

United States Board Certified Cosmetologist & Medical Aesthetician Roopa Ambekar is a two-time national award winner, and a published artist. With over twenty-three years of experience in key leadership positions within the top American beauty brands, she has been a beauty educationalist, industry columnist, and is the Ex-Dean of the Paul Mitchell Institute in the USA.

A casual salon visit when she travelled to India six years ago was what gave her an insight into the disorganised beauty industry, as well as the outdated beauty education system. With the vision to groom our beauty industry with her expertise and knowledge, she established the award-winning Uber Salon, Spa, and Skin Clinic in Bangalore as she settled in India with her family.

Now, with the knowledge and expertise from her international experience combined with her entrepreneurial skills to run a successful beauty business in India, Mrs Roopa Ambekar is launching her education brand - the Roopa Ambekar International Institute of Cosmetology (RAIIC).

@roopambekar

Roopa Kudva , Partner & Managing Director, Omidyar Network India Advisors | @OmidyarNetwork

Roopa is partner at Omidyar Network and managing director of Omidyar Network India Advisors, where she leads overall investment strategy and operations. In her role, Roopa helps Omidyar Network manage and develop the India-based portfolio across core initiatives.

Prior to joining Omidyar Network, Roopa spent 23 years with CRISIL, and was its managing director and chief executive officer from 2007. She led CRISIL's transformation from being India’s premier ratings agency into a diversified global analytical company. Under her leadership the company's market capitalization grew four-fold and revenues tripled. She led the company's expansion plans and CRISIL now has a presence in 150 cities across India and research centers in Argentina, Poland and China. Its client base includes some of the largest global investment banks and as well as tens of thousands of small firms and enterprises in India.

Roopa also worked for Standard & Poor's, Paris, as director, financial institutions ratings. She is regularly featured in the media as a prominent woman leader in corporate India. She has served as a member of several policy-level committees relating to the Indian financial system, and is an independent director on the board of Infosys, one of India's most respected software companies.

Roopa holds a postgraduate diploma in management from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A).

Roopa Purushothaman, Managing Director and Head of Research, Everstone Capital Advisors

Roopa Purushothaman is a Managing Director and Head of Research for Everstone Capital Advisors.

 

Prior to joining Everstone in 2006, Roopa had over six years of experience having worked as a Vice President and Global Economist at Goldman Sachs, where she published papers on topics including long term growth, global trade and migration in the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China). Roopa holds a Bachelor’s degree in Ethics, Politics and Economics and in International Studies from Yale University and a Master’s degree in Development Studies from the London School of Economics.

Roopal Kulsrestha, Partner - M & A, Private Equity & General Corporate, Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas &Co

Roopal Kulsrestha, is a Corporate, M&A and PE Partner based out of the Mumbai office of the Firm. She has extensive experience in cross border M&A / private equity deals across a range of sectors including insurance, real estate, hospitality and infrastructure. Roopal has also advised clients in public M&A acquisitions in listed Indian companies.

Roopal actively represents various private equity funds and large corporate clients on transactional and advisory matters. Her key clients include, Brookfield Asset Management, Blackstone (real estate), L Catterton, Liberty Mutual Group, Tyson Inc., IKEA and Sumitomo Chemicals Co Limited.

Roopal has featured in RSG India Report, 2017 and been recommended for “Corporate” and described as “having ‘a keen eye for detail’ with ‘a fantastic grip over all the moving pieces of a transaction”. She has also been called a ‘reliable lawyer’ with good legal expertise. Recent articles include, “Issues in reclassification of listed companies’ promoters”, “Conundrum of funding for insurance companies”  both published in the Asia Business Law Journal.

Roopam Asthana, CEO, Liberty General Insurance

Roshika Kumari Singh, Principal Country Officer, IFC India

Roshika Singh is the Principal Country Officer for the IFC, a member of the World Bank Group and the largest global development institution focused on the private sector in emerging markets. IFC delivers long-term financing in developing countries, leveraging the power of the private sector to end extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity.

Roshika is part of the Country Management team that is responsible for the development and implementation of the country strategy.   Roshika actively leads key engagements with multidisciplinary teams, including participation in the Sustainable Finance Task Force, co-hosted by the Ministry of Finance (MOF), RBI and SEBI, the G20 infrastructure finance track and inputs for India’s Climate Finance Taxonomy.  Roshika worked in IFC’s Gender Business Group, rolling out products for women’s banking. She worked on promoting employer-supported childcare in special economic zones, with financial institutions and garment factories across Bangladesh and Cambodia, as well as women’s employment programs in the agriprocessing sector.

Prior to IFC, Roshika worked at Deloitte in the USA and UK, as a Fund Manager for the Business Linkages Challenge Fund (BLCF) and as the Activity Manager for the Kosovo Business Finance Fund (KBFF).  Roshika started her career supporting USAID efforts to employ technology as a tool to increase access to information, transparency, and accountability across a host of ministries and central banking systems in Georgia, Armenia, Moldova, Ukraine and Macedonia and across East Africa and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region.

Roshika authored a chapter on Small Customers, Big Market: Commercial Banks in Microfinance and her articles for the Huffington Post include Banking on Women: The Path to Financial Inclusion in India, Gender Lens Investing:  A Step Towards Woman-Friendly Capitalism and More Women Employees and Leaders, A Crying Need in Indian Companies.  She also led the development of the IFC Blended Finance for Climate Investments in India report.

Ms. Singh holds a BA from the American University and an MSc from the London School of Economics.

Rrahul Sethi, Co-Founder, Head of Talent, Delivery & Partnerships, Expoodle

In the last 22-years as a professional & entrepreneur, Rrahul has made friends, built companies, sold companies, invested in people, and learned his way up. He has spent a reasonable time building business in South Africa, the United States, and India.

Rrahul has over 2 decades of experience in the Enterprise of Tech domain. An Entrepreneur for the past 17-years, he has built 2-Tech companies & has successfully executed 100% slump sale of Procure-To-Pay product company in 2018.
In 2020, he co-founded Expoodle & started his immersive experience journey of frontrunners in ever-evolving immersive tech & Metaverse opportunities.

He was awarded the ‘Proto Award’ for India’s most innovative Startups (Times Media Group). In the year 2018, he was also felicitated at BRICS Alliance Summit in New Delhi for emerging product development in the sustainable technology space.

Rubi Arya, Executive Vice Chairman, Milestone Capital Advisors

Rubi has over 18 years of professional experience in Business Strategy, Real Estate and General Management. At Milestone, she is responsible for designing Milestone’s overall corporate strategy, vision and future initiatives for business expansion, as well as the company’s representative at Global as well as Indian investor forums.

Under her leadership, Milestone has showcased its full cycle capability of fund raise, deployment, nurturing and profitable divestments and has invested as well as returned over Rs. 2800 crores  to the investors by way of timely exits and investment income across all funds.

Rubi leads and mentors the top management and continues to drive the company’s active management philosophy and devotes her time to putting together the team’s combined knowledge and experience towards securing profitable deals, right from investment to divesting. Prior to joining Milestone, Rubi was Global Head – HR at Kingfisher Airlines and has also held various senior positions at companies like Asian Paints & Price Waterhouse Coopers.

Engg. graduate from BITS (MESRA), MBA from XLRI, Jamshedpur and Executive Programme at Harvard Business School. Holds Certificate of Excellence from “The Directors’ Club”,  a unique accredited certification program by Hunt Partners and Board Evaluations Ltd. (UK) aimed at elevating effective governance on the board of directors at Indian as well as global organisations.

@RubiArya30

Rucha Nanavati, Chief Information Officer, Mahindra Group

Rucha Nanavati, Chief Information Office at Mahindra Group, is a global leader with experience in enabling business strategies through technology solutions. Rucha has led successful digital transformations in multiple industries including high-tech, retail and manufacturing. She is passionate about fostering innovations and cultivating an engineering culture and is known for developing and directing large global, cross-functional tech teams that deliver high-value, transformational initiatives. Rucha’s previous experiences range from consulting role at PricewaterHousecoopers to technology leadership roles at Albertsons Companies and Motorola.

Rucha is passionate about mentoring and helping women move forward in technology and at workplaces in general. She also mentors start-ups and a strong promoter of women led start-ups as well.

Ruchir Lahoty, Director, New Enterprise Associates (India) Pvt. Ltd.

Ruchir joined NEA's India office in 2008 and is a Director based in Mumbai and co-manages NEA’s investment in FSS, MEdRC Edutech, Naaptol and Vishwa Infra. He brings more than six years of experience in various roles in private equity investing, equity research and M&A and IT services. Prior to joining NEA, he was with ICICI Venture where he worked on investment opportunities in retail, consumer, FMCG, media, telecom services, payment services, technology products/services and education. He also actively managed portfolio companies in textile, payment services, technology and retail.

He has worked with Thomas Weisel in India as a lead equity research analyst and with TATA Consulting Services (TCS) in delivery roles as well as in their in-house M&A group. He has an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ahmedabad and a B.Com (Honours) from Delhi University.