Our speakers

C P Appanna, General Manager, NABARD

Mr. Appanna is the General Manager at the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development's (NABARD) Head office in Mumbai, Maharashtra INDIA. At NABARD while working in various capacities at 06 different States of India in the last three decades, he has interacted in conceptualisation and project formulation leading to project funding with technical input and marketing strategy keeping in view domestic and overseas market demand and supply of crops. He is also being directly involved in identification of potential for future funding programmes and in addition to certain promotional and developmental activities especially in the innovative/ hi-tech areas that are relatively new to Bankers/ Entrepreneurs in India.

He has earlier worked as one of the successful Agricultural Field Officers for a period of six years and three months in Union Bank of India which is one of the premier commercial Banks of India.

He has done his Masters in Agriculture from the University of Agrcultural Sciences (UAS), Bangalore, INDIA and also completed a training programme  "Advanced project appraisal for Agriculture and Rural Development "from the HARVARD Institute For International Development    Harvard, Boston, M A, United States of America. 

C S Setty, MD, SBI

C.R. Chandrasekar, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, FundsIndia.com | @FundsIndia

Chandrasekar started his career at MicroStrategy, a leading data mining and analytics firm in USA. Later, he moved on to work for Morgan Stanley and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, before starting his own retirement solutions company – ExpertPlan. Currently, ExpertPlan is the number 1 third-party online administrator for retirement solutions in USA. He returned to India in 2003 and started an off-shore software solutions firm, Arrowpoint Technologies, which specializes in financial applications for clients across the globe. After witnessing the dearth of online mutual fund investing platforms, Chandrasekar decided to establish FundsIndia with his close friend, Srikanth Meenakshi.

Chandrasekar received his Masters degree in Computer Science at the Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Virginia. Through FundsIndia, he aims to educate and empower investors so that they can comprehend and execute the knowledge acquired towards making smart investments.

C.Venkat Subramanyam, Founder & Director, Veda Corp

Venkat is a co-founder of Veda and has more than 16 years of hands-on experience in the investment banking business. Venkat has been a pioneer in the investment banking space in India and has been closely associated with the growth of the Indian VC/PE industry since the mid nineties. He has an enviable track record of transaction closures in private equity as well as M&A, having crafted several defining transaction across domains such as services, infrastructure and ITeS, amongst others.

Venkat is a successful entrepreneur in his own right having co-founded Mantra Consultants in 1998 (along with Vinod Kumar), a boutique investment bank based in South India, which was subsequently acquired by Ernst & Young in 2001. He was an Associate Director at Ernst & Young before co-founding Veda in late 2003.

Venkat is an Associate Member of the Institute of Company Secretaries of India. He is a regular speaker in industry forums and his views on are often quoted in the business media. He enjoys strong and long standing relationships with several leading private equity funds and their managers.

Carlton Pereira, MD, Tano Capital

Carlton is a co-founding partner of Tano Capital in India.  Tano was established in February 2006.  Prior to Tano, he was most recently the Managing Director and Partner in charge of Corporate Finance for KPMG in India, the Middle East and South Asia.  Carlton had been an investment banker and a consultant advisor for 18 years in all, before Tano.

Carlton is a Bachelor of Commerce from the Bombay University and Fellow Member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India.

CB Velayuthan, CEO, Digital Connexion

CB Velayuthan is the Chief Executive Officer at Digital Connexion. 

A seasoned leader with over 25 years of experience working in the US, Europe, and Asia, he is a results-focused executive with passion for technology as a force for empowering people and organizations to build a better tomorrow. 

Before joining Digital Connexion, CB was the Global Managing Director of Strategic Alliances at Equinix, USA, where he successfully led business with large enterprises. Prior to that, he led Global Sales for Nokia, driving significant revenue growth. During his time there, he also created a Partner Business Unit and spent many years in the India Market building nationwide Telecom networks for key operators.

CB holds an MBA in Global Business from Helsinki School of Economics and an undergraduate degree from Bharathiyar University, India. His interests include reading, golf, and long-distance running. He also serves as the President of a First Robotics team in California to support youth to learn and design robots.

Cdr. Navneet Bali, CEO, Clearmedi Healthcare

Chakradhar Gade, Co-Founder, Country Delight

Chakradhar is co-founder of Country Delight, India’s largest direct-to-home food essentials brand that uses  technology to deliver pure , fresh and minimally processed food essentials directly to consumers doorstep eliminating all middlemen in between. Prior to Country Delight, he worked as a computer science engineer initially and later as a finance professional with New York based asset management company. He is an avid movie watcher and poker player.

Chakri Lokapriya, MD, TCG Asset Management

Chanchal Agarwal, CIO, Credence Family Office