Our speakers

Avnish Mehra, Managing Director, Everstone Capital Advisors

Avnish Mehra is a Managing Director in the private equity team of Everstone Group. Avnish joined Everstone in 2016, with more than 18 years’ experience in global investment firms based in Asia and Europe. Most recently, Avnish was a member of the team that established the India business for Advent International. Avnish has also worked with ABN Amro and Virgin Media.

He holds a Master of Arts in Economics from Cambridge University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi. He is also is a CFA Charter Holder from the CFA Institute (USA).

Avnish Mehra, MD, Everstone Capital

Avnish Mehra joined Everstone in 2016 and is responsible for leading deal teams in the health-care and media sectors as well as special situations. Avnish has over 18 years’ experience in global investment firms based in Asia and Europe, and has worked with ABN Amro and Virgin Media. Most recently, he was a member of the team that established the India business for Advent International. Avnish holds a Bachelor of Economics from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, with a Master of Economics from Cambridge University. He is also a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) charterholder from the CFA Institute in the USA.

Avnish Sabharwal, Managing Director, Accenture Ventures & Open Innovation

Avnita Bir, Director-Principal, R N Podar School

Mrs. Avnita Bir, Director-Principal, Podar Schools, is a well-known educator. A postgraduate in Economics from Delhi School of Economics, Mrs. Bir has worked in the field of Education for over three decades across various institutes. She is a member of the Governing Body of CBSE, the leading education board of the country. She has been a member of Education Reforms Committee. Ms. Bir is also a member of the India Jurisdiction at the Global Education Leaders Program (GELP). Passionate about children, education, economics and technology, she has been able to combine all her interests into her professional life. Her dedication to the cause of good education propelled her to author two books on Economics in her early years in the profession. Mrs. Avnita Bir is the recipient of the prestigious National Award for Teachers, conferred by the Hon'ble President of India. She has also been honored by the President of Singapore for her contribution to the education sector. She was awarded the Microsoft Mentor School Award for Innovation in Education. She also received the FICCI Outstanding Woman Achiever Award for her work in the field of education. More recently she was invited to Google, to speak at the Google Global Education Symposium at the Google Headquarters in Mountain View. She has been appointed as a member of the Advisory Board of Google's GlobalEDU.org initiative.  Mrs. Bir has been driving change at R N Podar School and it has just been selected as the Ashoka ChangeMaker School in the first cohort of Ashoka ChangeMaker Schools in India. Having been an active proponent of appropriate edtech in schools and the classroom along with innovative pedagogy, Mrs. Bir has been acknowledged for and rewarded several Leadership and Mentorship Awards. She writes a guest column on parenting for the Times of India group and has been covered widely in media like BBC, New York Times, Times of India, NDTV, Times Now etc for her thoughts on education.

@avnita

Ayan De, CTO, Exide Life Insurance

Ayan is a technology strategist with over two decades of experience in the Insurance industry. He has specialties in technology-based process transformation, business process management, risk analysis and business continuity management. He has managed turnkey technology projects aimed at business transformation at some of the major insurance players across the South Asia geography.

Ayas Al Gul, Group finance director, United Technology Holding (Yas Holding Division)

Ayaskant Sarangi, CHRO, Mphasis Limited

Ayaskant currently heads the human resources function for Mphasis globally.

He brings with him more than two and half decades of human resources experience spanning multiple industries in areas like work force planning, talent acquisition, talent management, C&B, M&A, L&D and Analytics.

Prior to his current role, Ayaskant has worked with Wipro for 11 years including being the CHRO for Wipro Enterprises and before that has played multiple roles in Wipro Limited including leading the human resources function for service lines as well as providing leadership to many COEs globally such as leadership hiring, talent management and learning & development. Prior to Wipro, Ayaskant has worked with organizations like General Electric, Infosys Technologies and Larsen & Toubro. In General Electric, Ayaskant had more than a decade long stint with more than 8 years with GE Healthcare and 3 years with GE Corporate.

Ayaskant is a regular speaker in many other Industry forums and also mentors a couple of start- ups in Human Resources.

Ayaskant has done his engineering from NIT Surat and his master’s in human resources from Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar.

Ayush Bansal, Head, RazorpayX

Ayush Varshney, CTO/Co-Founder, Bluegape.com

Azhar Iqubal, Co-founder , News In Shorts

Azhar Iqubal, Co-founder and CEO of News in Shorts (NIS), started the venture along with his friends Anunay and Deepit in 2013, while still in college. The initial response was very good which made them left their studies to devote full time to the venture. He was studying Mathematics and Computing at IIT Delhi, when the idea of News in 60 words came into his mind. He do not used to read news at all before starting the venture. The overwhelming and complex nature of the existing media was the reason behind the same. This was the reason behind starting NIS, a extremely simple easy to use app with only the crux of the happenings.