Speakers | Events and Training

Darshan Shah, Co-Founder & CEO, NewsReach India

Darshana Shah, Sr.Vice President - Marketing and Visual Merchandising, Hypercity Retail

Darshana Shah holds a Master degree in Marketing from NMIMS .She has over 14 years of work experience with 6 years in the IT and 8 years in the retail sector. Thus her work experience spans from stepping into the IT Industry to establishing herself in the retail sector. With expertise in varied areas like operations, marketing, brand building, private brands marketing, retail communications. She has worked with retail giants like Shopper’s Stop, Future Group (Pantaloons and Big bazaar) & Reliance Retail.

Darshana is very passionate about travelling and meeting different people across the globe and learning about their culture & heritage. She loves dancing and is a certified Indian classical dancer (Bharatnatyam). An avid reader, she enjoys reading fiction and also loves experimenting with continental cuisines in her spare time.

Darshika Kothari, Partner, AZB Partners

Darshika Kothari is a partner of AZB & Partners specializing in private equity investments, mergers and acquisitions and joint ventures. She has over 14 years of experience in the legal field, spearheading several large transactions, advising marquee private equity clients as well other leading international and Indian corporations and financial institutions with regard to various legal and regulatory aspects.

Darshika’s extensive experience ranges from structuring instruments, formulating entry and exit strategies, and governance issues to advising on acquisitions and investments in India and abroad, takeovers, foreign investment regulations, securities related laws, complex regulatory issues and securities litigation. She has advised the firm’s leading clients with regard to their Indian ventures and investments in a broad range of sectors.

Darshika also often participates in several legal reforms committees and policy initiatives.

Dattaraj Rao, Chief Data Scientist, Persistent Systems

Dattaraj Jagdish Rao is the author of the book “Keras to Kubernetes: The journey of a Machine Learning model to Production”. Dattaraj is the Chief Data Scientist at Persistent with 25+ years’ experience driving digital transformation, powered by AI. He has championed key solution accelerators like Persistent’s GenAI Hub, Responsible AI based Evaluation framework, Knowledge Graphs for Precision Medicine & Drug Discovery, Agentic Workflows and MS teams based Employee Policy Bot. He leads a team of world-class data scientists that explores the state-of-the-art in Large Language Models (LLM), Multi-modal models (LMM), Responsible AI and constantly delivers innovation in Healthcare, BFSI and Cybersecurity domains.

Earlier, he worked at General Electric (GE) for 20 years building Industrial IoT solutions for Predictive Maintenance, Digital Twins and Machine Vision. He held several Technology Leadership roles at Global Research, GE Power and Transportation (now Wabtec). He led the Innovation team out of Bangalore that incubated video track-inspection from an idea into a commercial Product called “LocoVISION”. Dattaraj has a Bachelors’ degree in Mechanical Engineering and 11 patents in Machine Learning. He is based in Goa, India.

Dave Richards, Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Unitus Seed Fund

Dave Richards is an experienced entrepreneur, executive, and global early-stage investor. In 2012, he co-founded Unitus Seed Fund, now the leading venture seed fund supporting startups innovating for the masses in India. Unitus Seed Fund is part of the Unitus Group, a premier financial services group operating in India and other emerging markets since 2000. He has been an early investor in microfinance and other businesses serving low-income populations. Since 2005, he has been involved with the Unitus Group, helping to lead efforts to select and invest in entrepreneurs in many developing countries. He led the Unitus Labs incubator for 2 years including the successful research and spinout of two venture firms: Unitus Impact and Unitus Seed Fund. He also led Unitus Investment Management, the General Partner of Unitus Equity Fund, a pioneering microfinance venture fund, was a board member of Unitus Capital, a leading Bangalore-based investment bank, and was on the investment committee for Unitus Impact.

Dave Richards, Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Capria Ventures

A tech entrepreneur for 20 years and a scaler for 15 years in the ‘Global South, Dave Richards, Managing Partner at Capria Ventures, is an early-growth investor which includes strategic investments in local early-stage VC funds in Global South and is passionate to mentor startup CEOs and emerging GPs.

He co-founded Capria in 2012, Unitus Ventures in 2005 and quickly grew into one of South/Southeast Asia’s most experienced global investors. As a Managing Partner, his responsibilities currently include investment sourcing and diligence, portfolio management, fundraising and investor relations, and oversight of finance, business operations, compliance and administration.

Dave brings to Capria deep experience as an entrepreneur, executive, and global early-stage and early-growth venture capital investor. At Capria, he has been on the leadership team launching and operating 2 early-stage India venture funds (under Unitus Ventures brand), and the Capria GP Accelerator and Capria Fund, investing in 40+ early-stage and early-growth funds and tech companies across the global south in sectors including fintech, edtech, logistics, healthtech, agtech, jobtech and consumer.

Dave has constructed a robust position in the Global South startup and VC ecosystem through his continuous work to boost impact. His entrepreneurial experience and success have led him to discover and support many early-stage ventures in the Southeast Asia markets which are front-runners in creating impact-led solutions in the region. Early in his career, Dave had developed and led multiple high-growth technology businesses at RealNetworks, Sybase and Symantec from startup to multiple hundred million dollar global enterprises. He is a Partner with Social Venture Partners Seattle and co-founder of the SVP Fast Pitch startup impact angel fund.

David Lorenz, NonStop Sales, HPE North America

David Lorenz is an HPE NonStop sales person from Tampa Florida with over $300M in direct sales to the finance, telecommunications, DoD, and retail industries. Working with smaller companies and partners to help expand the HPE NonStop partner ecosystem through ITUG and more recently Connect organizations has long been a passion of David’s. More recently David has been the HPE representative at NACHA ( US ACH association) and the NACHA payments alliance as he sees tremendous opportunity to evolve and expand the NonStop operating environment beyond the card networks and into the rapidly evolving mobile finance marketplace.

Working closely with customers in the telecommunications and financial services industry over his career gives David a very unique perspective on their convergence. dlo has a keen interest in monetary history and the geopolitical and social events that are driving the rapid evolution that is happening in payments today.

Daykin Creado, Chief Technology Officer, ItzCash

Mr. Daykin Creado is the Chief Technology Officer at ItzCash Card Ltd and is responsible for establishing & implementing the company’s technology roadmap, strategy & vision. He comes with experience in running enterprise wide, transaction processing intensive, mission critical applications. Prior to ItzCash, he served as Vice President – IT at HDFC Bank Ltd running enterprise architecture, service oriented architecture and payment related direct banking channels.

Mr. Creado comes with strong business technology experience. He has managed and implemented myriad of projects for direct banking channels such as core financial switching (BASE24), Visa/MasterCard/Diners/RuPay/NFS/Cashnet interchanges multi factor authentication, RBI compliance & mandates, point of sale merchant acquiring, e-commerce payment gateway, government payment and integration projects, UIDAI integration, e-KYC, inbound & outbound contact centres, PCI-DSS and many more. He was responsible for roadmap, adoption and implementation of service oriented architecture (SOA) as well as solution engineering and architecture at an enterprise level.

He was also involved in a roll out of applications for managing on-boarding of customers for retail assets and various other business intelligence projects such as credit underwriting, 360 degree view of customers etc. Prior to HDFC Bank Ltd, he held roles at Sybase Inc and NIIT Ltd. Born and raised in Mumbai, he holds a Masters degree in Microbiology from the University of Mumbai.

Daykin Creado, CEO, Go Payments

Our speakers