Prayank Swaroop is a Partner at Accel, and joined the firm in 2011. He focuses on cybersecurity, developer tools, marketplaces, and SaaS investments. Some of the investments led by him are - Aavenir, Bizongo, Maverix, OnsiteGo, Securden, Slintel, Skeps, and Zetwerk. Prior to Accel, he worked at Adobe and Standard Chartered Bank in India and Singapore. He held positions across engineering, product marketing, pre-sales, and product management. He has an integrated master's degree in...

Priya Saiprasad is a General Partner at Touring Capital, a fund investing in enterprise-focused AI powered global startups. She co-founded Touring after 13 years in venture capital, M&A and enterprise technology. She was most recently a Partner at SoftBank Vision Fund, where she led investments into category-defining software companies including Pixis, Vendr, Observe.ai, CommerceIQ, Sendoso and Skedulo. Previously, Priya was at Mayfield Fund focused on early-growth investments, and a...

Rohit Bansal is the Co-founder Snapdeal, one of the largest online marketplaces in India. The company has raised over $1.7B from eBay, Kalaari Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Intel Capital, BlackRock, Temasek Holdings and SoftBank. He is also the Co-Founder of Titan Capital, which has invested in companies such as Mamaearth, Dealshare, OLA, RazorPay and OfBusiness. He an alumnus of Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. . . . Episode Notes: Introduction...

Shubham Goel is the Co-foudner and Co-CEO of Affinity, a relationship intelligence platform for dealmakers. The company has raised over $120M in funding from Menlo Ventures, MassMutual Ventures, Pear VC and Advance Venture Partners. Prior to Affinity, Shubham completed his BS in Computer Science at Stanford University. . . . Episode notes: What made Shubham pick entrepreneurship (2:00) Propensity of risk increasing as the company grows (6:08) The journey until the ah-ha moment...

Sumeet Mehta is the co-founder and CEO of LEAD, a detect company helping digitize and transform affordable private schools to better serve students from middle and low-income groups of families. Before co-founding LEAD, Sumeet was Chief Executive Officer at Zee Learn (2007-2012). He transformed the institution from a pre-school franchise company to an education company with a presence in pre-schools and K-10 schools, and science activity and animation classes. Prior to that, Sumeet spent...

Sankar Bora is the Co-founder & COO, Dealshare, a social ecommerce startup in India, that has raised close to $400M in venture money from marquee investors such as Alpha Wave Global, Tiger Global, Matrix India, Alteria Capital and WestBridge Capital. Prior to this, he co-founded Myntra in 2007, which was sold to Flipkart in 2010. . . . Episode Notes: Why entrepreneurship? (2:30) What gave Sankar the conviction to embark on the path of entrepreneurship (5:50) Early days of Mantra...

Aloke Bajpai is the Co-founder and CEO of ixigo.com a platform that aggregates and compares real-time travel information, prices and availability for flights, trains, buses, and hotels, and allows ticket booking through its associate websites and apps. Since ixigo's launch in 2007, the company has gone from a bootstrapped startup to India’s leading travel search and planning business, with over 20 million active users every month across mobile and web. Aloke graduated from IIT Kanpur in...

Rajat Tandon is the President of IVCA, India's apex body representing the interests of PE/VC industry, Real estate, Infrastructure and Credit funds, Limited Partners, Family offices & Corporate VC's. Rajat leads the planning, development, and implementing IVCA’s regulatory advocacy activities, while also effectively influencing regulatory outcomes in support of the alternate asset class. Previously, Rajat was part of the leadership team at NASSCOM, where he headed NASSCOM’s 10,000...

Rohit Sood is the Partner at Bertelsmann India Investments (BII), an investment firm that invests in companies in the digital, education, media, and services sectors. The firm also focuses on early-stage, as well as growth-stage investments. Rohit was the founding team member and has been part of Bertelsmann from Day 0 having seen the growth of the fund over the last decade as well played an instrumental part in shaping India’s startup ecosystem. Prior to Bertelsmann, he spent some time at...

Saurabh Saxena is a serial edtech entrepreneur who has co-founded Lakshya, Vedantu and Power Club (previously known as Uable). He has been an educator and Edtech entrepreneur for 15 years now. After graduating from IIT Roorkee in 2005 he started Lakshya, a chain of offline learning centres. After a successful exit, Saurabh then co-founded Vedantu in 2012 which then went on to become one of the leading online test prep companies. Shortly after becoming a parent himself, Saurabh realised that...

Nandini Mansinghka is the CEO of Mumbai Angels, an investment firm that now operates under the 360 One umbrella. She came on board as the third Co-Founder, operating partner, and CEO in 2017. She has vast years of experience across the Investment Banking, Media, and Education industries and worked for 5+ years with J.P. Morgan in India in leadership positions in the Investment Banking research group. Before J.P. Morgan, she has worked for over 5 years with the Times of India Group. She also...

Dr. Pankaj Jethwani is the Executive Vice President at W Health Ventures, a Boston-based venture capital firm focused on helping entrepreneurs build the future of healthcare delivery in the US and India. Over the last ten years, Dr. Jethwani has been involved in improving care delivery in several care settings in the US and India as a physician leader, operator, management consultant, and investor.Dr. Jethwani started his career as a Primary Care Physician in Mumbai, India. Through this...

Saurabh Pandey, co-founder and CEO of EloElo. EloElo is an app that enables live-social experiences through games and entertainment. It is currently among the top 10 Apps on the Google Play Store in India with over 10M downloads. It accommodates 34,000 creators and offers a staggering 400 million minutes of live content. The company has raised $15M from Kalaari Capital, KB Investment, Lumikai, WaterBridge Ventures and Better Capital. Before Eloelo, he accumulated a decade of experience in...

Karan Desai is the Founder and Managing Partner at Interface Ventures, an early-stage venture fund based out of Mumbai, India. He’s an operator turned investor who brings a diverse skill set that encompasses extensive experience in operations, investment banking, and financial consulting. Prior to Interface, he was the Joint Managing Director at Trucap Finance Ltd., a rapidly expanding NBFC listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange which specializes in providing finance to MSME businesses in...

Yohei Nakajima is the General Partner at Untapped Capital, a pre-seed and seed-stage focused fund investing in under-represented founders in the US. At Untapped Capital, the sweet spot is investing $100k-$250k checks into startups based raising at $3-7m in valuation. Yohei has been supporting early-stage startups for 15 years, originally starting on the community side organizing events and educational courses for founders out of coworking spaces. He has spent the last 7 on the investing...

Prateek Agarwal is the Investment lead at First Cheque, a micro VC fund based out of Bangalore that invests $100K in pre-seed startups in India. Prior to this role, Prateek worked with the India Business Head at Dr. Reddy's where he was responsible for tracking business metrics, identifying areas of improvement, and leading strategic projects. His background as both a consultant and operator at firms like Dr. Reddy's and EY has allowed him to develop skills in strategic planning, project...

Nitin Jain is a well-known name in the Indian startup ecosystem as the co-founder and Chief Business Officer of OfBusiness, a tech-enabled platform that provides raw material procurement and credit solutions to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in India. With a strong background in structured solutions trading, Nitin has played a key role in OfBusiness' success, helping the company raise over $875M from top investors like Tiger Global, SoftBank Vision Fund, and Matrix Partners, among...

Beerud Sheth is the co-founder and CEO of Gupshup, the world's leading platform for cloud messaging and conversational experiences. It is used by over 30K+ developers and handles over 4.5 billion messages per month. The company has raised more than $480M from marquee investors such as Helion Venture Partners, Tiger Global, CRV, White Oak among many others. He was previously the co-founder of Elance (now Upwork), the world's largest online services marketplace, which went public in 2018....

Abhishek Goyal is the Co-founder, Vice Chairman, and Executive Director of Tracxn, a leading research firm that provides market intelligence data on private companies. Since its founding in 2012, Tracxn has secured funding from top investors like 3one4 Capital, Elevation Capital, Prime Venture Partners, and angel investors including Sachin and Binny Bansal, and has grown to become a highly profitable business. After much success, Tracxn debuted on the NSE in October 2022, becoming one of the...

Sanam Rawal is the Founder and Partner at Metamorph (previously known as Passion Connect), a Blume Ventures-incubated human resource advisory platform that helps startups grow with talent acquisition, talent branding, acquisitions, research, learning and development and more. With offices in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, and Pune, Metamorph has assisted in the hiring of more than 800 candidates, including CEOs and senior vice presidents for well-known startups such as Unacademy, Slice,...

Jen Abel is the accomplished Co-Founder of JJELLYFISH, a Boston-based firm renowned for its pioneering approach in assisting B2B startups to achieve early-stage sales proficiency and success in the United States, as well as the UK and Australia markets. With over six years of experience in the industry, JJELLYFISH has empowered over 200 B2B/enterprise startups to validate their sales process and go-to-market strategy, demonstrating a commitment to delivering exceptional results. The firm's...

Rahul Chowdhury is the Managing Partner at N+1 Capital, India’s first revenue based debt fund. He brings 18+ years of intensive entrepreneurial and operating experience. He is a two-time founder, having founded and sold DenuoSource, a Chicago-based data analytics firm, in 2011. He later founded Reboot, India's first refurbished IT asset lifecycle management firm. How does revenue-based-financing (RBF) work? N+1 will provide startups access to capital, at a premium, without taking any...

Tarun Sharma is Managing Partner at MegaDelta Capital Advisors, a sub-advisor to Millenna Capital, a Mauritius based investment fund as well as an investment manager of MegaDelta Capital Fund I, a SEBI registered Category II Alternate Investment Fund. The fund has invested in companies such as GOQii, Nova, IDfy, Naaptol, Firstcry, MoneyTap etc. and others. MegaDelta typically invest $15-25M across sectors of such as Healthcare, Enterprise technology and Engineering Services. Tarun has more...

Kanika Mayar is a Partner at Vertex Ventures SEA & India (VVSEAI), a fund part of the global Vertex Ventures network of funds, with portfolio companies such as Licious, FirstCry, Nium, Binance, Grab, Yatra, and Happy Fresh. In addition to Southeast Asia and India, the Vertex Global Network is comprised of affiliates in Silicon Valley, China and Israel. Kanika joined Vertex Ventures in 2020 and focuses on opportunities in India in agritech, B2B, consumer, and health tech. Kanika has...