Advisors

Rentala Chandrashekhar was the former president of NASSCOM and former Secretary to the Indian Department of Information Technology, as well as former Secretary, Department of Telecommunications. He is also a member of the government’s technology advisory group, TAGUP. Chandrashekhar is an Indian Administrative Services officer. He has had a distinguished career in the Department of Information Technology, where he initiated the National e-Governance Programme. Chandrashekhar first initiated the three pillars of “e-Governance”, namely: Common Service Centre Programme; the State Data Centre Programme; and the State Wide Area Network Programme of India.

A diverse experience of 25+ years and exposure spanning across Financial Services, International Logistics, Consumer Electronics and Development Sector. Held Leadership positions, built high performance teams, established new business streams in geographies that includes India, South & Far East Asia and Europe with organisations like MRF group, Prudential ICICI, Royal Bank of Scotland, Narayana Health and Tata Trusts. Ravi has worked in the areas of Education, Healthcare and Livelihood through several projects and programs in partnership. Currently, he is the Head of Venture Philanthropy and Social Capital at Social Alpha, the Innovation and Entrepreneurship platform of Tata Trusts.

Dr. Kumar Ganapathy, is a serial entrepreneur and angel investor, with expertise in DSP, wireless and enterprise IT infrastructure. Kumar is currently the founder of Enterprise Labs (a new venture studio in the Bay Area creating enterprise cloud startups) and was a former CTO, CEO of VxTel and Virident, the two companies he co-founded and successfully sold for a combined $1.3B over the past two decades.

Sanjay Kadaveru is the Founder & President of Action For India (AFI), an initiative to help social entrepreneurs in India overcome barriers to scale and achieve greater impact at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Prior to launching AFI, Sanjay managed investments at The Seven Hills Group, a family office based in the US, where he supported the deployment of $50M in capital across several sectors: energy, media, IT, infrastructure and education. Sanjay is a Charter Member of The Indus Entrepreneurs, the world’s largest network of entrepreneurs, and served as a Co-Chair for TiECon East. Sanjay is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology at Madras and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Dr. B. Venkatesham is an Associate Professor at Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad. He earned his Doctorate from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, specializing in Duct Acoustics. Prior to joining IIIT Hyderabad in 2010, he worked at  the General Electric Global Research Centre. He has published 28 papers in International Journals, 50 conference papers and 3 patents in the area of Engineering Acoustics.  

He served as faculty-in charge for Placements of IIT Hyderabad for five Years and currently, he is serving as faculty-in charge of Entrepreneurship since 2015. He is one of the team members in establishing IIT Hyderabad Technology Business Incubator and Research Park.

Uday B. Desai received the B. Tech. degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India, in 1974, the M.S. degree from the State University of New York, Buffalo, in 1976, and the Ph.D. degree from The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, U.S.A., in 1979, all in Electrical Engineering. Since June 2009 he is the Director of IIT Hyderabad. He is the Mentor Director for IIT Bhilai and IIIT Chittoor. His research interest is in Cyber physical systems, Internet of things, digital fabrication, wireless communication, cognitive radio, wireless sensor networks and statistical signal processing. He has been a coauthor of 9 research monographs and author of nearly 300 peered reviewed papers in international journals and conferences.

Dr. S Suryakumar is a Associate Professor at Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad. He earned his Doctorate from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.
Currently he is serving as faculty-in-charge of Incubation cell & Research park.