Our speakers

Sharad Devarajan, Co-Founder & CEO, Graphic India

Mr. Sharad Devarajan is a media entrepreneur, creator and producer. He is the Co-Founder & CEO of Liquid Comics/ Liquid Studios, a digital entertainment company that uses the medium of graphic novel storytelling to develop original content for various digital platforms, publishing, theatrical live-action films, animation and games. He was previously the Co-Founder, CEO & Publisher of Virgin Comics LLC and Virgin Animation Pvt. Ltd, a set of companies he co-founded, with Sir Richard Branson, authors Deepak Chopra and filmmaker Shekhar Kapur.

Mr. Devarajan is also a Producer / Executive Producer on a number of theatrical live-action film and television projects in development. In digital entertainment, Mr. Devarajan worked with filmmaker John Woo and Tiger Hill, to produce the animated web series, “John Woo Presents: 7 Brothers,”.

Prior to Liquid, Mr. Devarajan was Co-Founder & CEO of Gotham Entertainment Group, which was a leading South Asian youth magazine publisher that launched the Indian publishing activities for DC Comics, Marvel Comics and Cartoon Network. In 2010, Mr. Devarajan led a project with the Open Hands Initiative, to bring together students with disabilities to work together and create a new superhero that reflected their shared challenges and shared values. The superhero, “Silver Scorpion,” received worldwide acclaim for promoting advocacy for the rights of the disabled in the Middle East.

For his activities, Mr. Devarajan was featured as CNNfn’s ‘Maverick in The Morning’ and covered in numerous media including The Wall Street Journal, Businessweek, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, Fox News and NPR’s Fresh Air.

He holds a BFA from Syracuse University and an MBA from Columbia University where he is an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School teaching the popular class, Media Marketing and Entrepreneurship, as well as, Transmedia & Transcreation: How Technology and Globalization are Transforming Media.

Sharad Gohil, Managing Director, IndoSpace Capital Advisors Pvt. Ltd.

Sharad Gohil joined IndoSpace in 2015, and currently oversees asset management across the platform. He has over 18 years of experience in real estate, specializing in asset management and investments across the core, value add and development real estate sectors in the UK, Europe, and India. Sharad has previously worked for Apollo Global Management Real Estate Funds in Europe, Asia Pacific and India, as well as, Citigroup Property Investors Asia Pacific, AXA REIM and The Portman Estate in the UK.

Sharad Malpani, Director, Venture Capital Investments, ICICI Venture

Sharad currently co-heads IVen Amplifi Fund which is a new early growth fund from ICICI Venture. He joined ICICI Venture’s Private Equity team in 2016. He has over 23 years of experience with ICICI Group, spanning across operating businesses, strategy, advisory & investments. He has spent last 14 years in Private Equity investment business and has managed transactions at multiple stages of the business with smaller to larger ticket sizes. Sharad has worked on transactions across sectors which include Consumer / Consumertech, BFSI / fintech, Agri, Manufacturing etc. He was founding member of team for early-stage growth private equity investment fund & has managed full life cycle of the fund. He also heads the ESG responsibilities for private equity business at ICICI Venture.

In his earlier role with SME Group of ICICI Bank, Sharad has seen larger set of companies across multiple industries across economic cycles. Sharad has also spent time with International Banking Group earlier with assignments in various countries.

Sharad holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Chemical Engineering and MMS degree from University of Mumbai.

Sharad Mittal , Executive Director & CEO, Motilal Oswal Real Estate Investment Advisors

Sharad joined MORE in 2013, spearheading the firm’s real estate fund practice and has been instrumental in rebuilding and scaling up the MORE business from an AUM of Rs. 200 Cr to more than Rs. 2,000 Cr over this period. Under his leadership, MORE has successfully raised two funds – IREF II (Rs. 500 Cr) and IREF III (Rs. 1031 Cr) and has a Prop Book/PMS of more than Rs. 300 Cr. During this period, the Funds have established a strong track record of profitable exits from investments and have received awards and accolades at the CNBC Awaaz Real Estate Awards. (“Real Estate Fund of the Year” for 2016-17). Sharad has over 16 years of experience in Real Estate investing, lending and fund raising.

Sharad Sanghi, CEO & MD, NetMagic Solutions Pvt. Ltd

Sharad Sanghi is the CEO of Netmagic (An NTT Communications Company), an organization that he founded in July 1998. He is also considered a pioneer in the Indian cloud computing space. It’s his vision that saw Netmagic launching Cloud services as part of its portfolio in 2009 and today has helped Netmagic become a leader in the Public Cloud services market in India.

 

Sharad led Netmagic through 3 successful VC funding rounds with Nexus Venture Partners, Fidelity, Cisco Systems, Nokia Growth Partners. He is an industry veteran with over twenty years of experience in developing Internet backbone infrastructure and providing Internet services. He is one of just a few Indians to have worked as an engineer on the first major backbone of the Internet: NSFNet in the US.

 

During a six-year stint in the US, Sharad worked with AT&T Bell Labs, the Backbone Engineering Group of NSFNET (ANS) and Advantis (IBM Global Network). He has also helped Merrill Lynch and Bankers Trust in designing and deploying wide area networks.

 

Sharad has a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay and a Masters degree from Columbia University in New York.

Sharad Sharma, Ex-CEO, Yahoo! India R&D

Sharad holds Electrical Engineering degree from Delhi College of Engineering. He has over 21 years of experience in the enterprise software and wireless infrastructure sectors. Prior to joining Yahoo!, he was involved in buyout activities focused on taking mid-sized software product companies private.

Previously, he was the India General Manager and VP of Product Operations with Symantec (formerly VERITAS Software) and was responsible for the turnaround of VERITAS operations in India. He was earlier a co-founder and CEO of Teltier Technologies, a New Jersey based wireless infrastructure start-up that became the leader in the Presence and Availability Management space and is now part of Cisco.

Sharad has managed product development teams at Lucent Technologies both in US and in India. He also setup AT&T’s and later Lucent’s R&D organization in India in mid-90s, at a time when offshore product development was just getting underway.

Sharad Talwar, CEO, IndiaCan Education

Sharad Talwar is a senior management professional with diverse experience of over 24 years with some of the most admired corporations in the country. His academic credentials include a management degree from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and an engineering degree from IIT Kharagpur, having graduated with top honours from these institutions.  

Sharad's career span includes stints at MNC's and leading Indian corporations. In his last role he was  Site Director, Operations with Convergys Inc ( a $ US 2.8 billion corporation ). Prior to that, he has held important positions at Dell, GE Capital, and HCL Hewlett Packard among others.

He has proven competencies in General Management, Marketing, Product Management, Sales, Operations, Business Strategy, running large start-up projects, turnarounds, Six Sigma and competency building. During his impactful tenures, Sharad has been involved in leadership roles across industries such as IT, IT enabled, market research and education.

Sharad now heads IndiaCan, a joint venture between Educomp, India's pioneering education company, and Pearson, the world's largest education services provider. This joint venture targets one of the country's biggest opportunities training young people. IndiaCan is a skilling and employability company which uses innovative technology solutions and VSAT delivery platform for scalability and consistent delivery of trained manpower, thereby mitigating paucity of good trainers in remote areas. IndiaCan's bottom-of-the-pyramid strategies in partnership with Government of India initiatives using technology, state of the art content and relevant international certifications - reach out to some of the most remote areas of the country in J&K, Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Assam, West Bengal, Orissa, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Bihar, Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan et al'. As the head of IndiaCan, Sharad is responsible for rolling out from concept to execution, the JV's strategy to provide employability linked and skill based education to youth across the country.

Sharaf Sharaf, Fund Head, Amplify Growth

Sharan Asher, Director, Eragon Ventures

Sharat Potharaju, CEO, MobStac

Sharat is responsible for all business development, sales, and marketing efforts at MobStac.

Prior to founding the company, Sharat spent over 3 years doing investment banking at Merrill Lynch in New York, where he worked in both the Corporate Finance and Leveraged Finance groups. In this role, Sharat assisted clients in deriving customized solutions to the corporate finance issues they were facing. His work spanned a diverse set of industries, including but not limited to, financial services, healthcare, retail, technology, etc., and also included executing multi-billion dollar financing and merger and acquisition transactions.

Prior to that, Sharat spent a summer on a venture capital initiative at Duke University working with entrepreneurs crafting business plans. Sharat has a Masters in Engineering Management (MEM) from Duke University, and a B. Tech in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras.

Sharat is also very passionate about politics and public governance. From October, 2008 to May, 2009 Sharat was on a break working at Janaagraha as the Head of Marketing and Communications for the very popular Jaago Re One Billion Votes Campaign, India's largest grassroots movement for voter registration to date.