Forbes India - Tech Conversations

In this episode, Arjun P Gupta, founder and CEO of Smart Joules in New Delhi, talks about his ambition to play a role in lifting millions of Indians from energy poverty and curtailing carbon emissions in the process. Arjun aspires to build an Indian company that can take on multinational giants such as Honeywell and Siemens in offering a building and energy management automation technology platform. He is currently looking to raise his series B funding for Smart Joules, which he founded in early 2015.

In this episode, Mrinal Rai, senior research manager and principal analyst at Information Services Group, a leading technology services outsourcing advisory company, talks about how demand is likely to shape up in the coming quarters for India’s top IT companies. With demand still strong, but caution seeping into actual spending, this is also the time for the vendors to do more, by investing and ramping up their business-transformation-oriented IT capabilities, Rai says.

In this episode, Varun Badhwar, Indian-born serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, talks about his latest venture, Endor Labs, which has just come out of stealth mode, announcing a $25 million seed funding round to commercialise a software product aimed at mitigating the risks involved in borrowing software components from the internet – a growing trend. Investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Dell Technologies Capital, Sierra Ventures, and CEOs and executives from Microsoft, Zoom, Zscaler, Palo Alto Networks and Snowflake.

In this episode, Jayanth Kolla, co-founder and partner at Convergence Catalyst, a tech consultancy in Bangalore, talks about how India, which once lagged other economies in deploying wireless technologies, has begun to take the lead, starting with 4G and 5G wireless. He also talks about his own work over the last decade, that started with consulting in the telecom space, is evolving into helping companies prepare for the “circular data economy” that is beginning to emerge.

In this episode, Vijay Prateik, founder and CEO at DeMITasse Energies, and cofounder and COO Megha Rawat, talk about their effort to help mitigate climate change. Prateik has spent over a decade developing a zero-emission power plant and energy storage solution for industrial applications that the duo expects to commercialise over the next two to three years. Incubated at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore’s Nadathur S Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning, DeMITasse is also in talks for its pre-series A funding to expand its R&D efforts into the US.

In this episode, Saket Dandotia and Vinayak Shrivastav, who co-founded a SaaS company VideoVerse, along with Alok Patil, talk about their AI technologies for all things sports video for enterprise customers. The trio had previously built an interactive video platform, called TOCH, at a company called Vogueme Technologies, founded in 2016. The broader metaverse-driven vision for its future led to Toch's rebranding as VideoVerse, in April. VideoVerse is a US-based company, founded in 2022, and has raised $58.6 million in funding, according to private markets insights provider Tracxn. 

In this episode, Ankit Jain and Sidhant Pai, co-founders of StepChange talk about the products they offer enterprise customers to track and reduce their carbon footprints. They also help companies attempting to build sustainable products get deep insights into the impact of their products and operations. Ankit and Sidhant are developing StepChange into a SaaS software platform that businesses can use to also specifically target what are called Scope 3 emissions, which the entrepreneurs say are the most difficult to curtail.

In this episode, Sanjay Swamy, managing partner and co-founder of Prime Venture Partners, and Anshul Rai, co-founder and CEO of Happay, talk about the central role of exits in the venture capital driven startup growth model. The VC investor and the entrepreneur break down everything from the timing of an exit to what not being able to provide a good exit to stakeholders can do to founders. Rai also reflects on what life is like, after Happay’s success and $180 million sale to Cred.

In this episode, Rishabh Agarwal, co-founder and CEO of Peer Robotics, talks about how more attention is being paid today to ‘human-centric’ technologies. Rishabh and his IIT Delhi senior Tanya Raghuvanshi founded the Delhi venture in 2019, and Tanya’s former boss at Interra Systems joined them as the third co-founder the following year. With $2.3 million in recent seed funding, led by Kalaari Capital, these entrepreneurs are looking to expand the market for their collaborative robots in the US and in India

In this episode, Kumar Abhishek and Vivek Kumar Singh, co-founders of Naffa Innovations, a startup better known for its sound-based technologies under the name ToneTag, talk about how their tech is like the ‘Intel inside’ model, today making sound-based transactions possible on a 100 million Android phones. They also talk about a solution that allows feature phone users to make UPI payments using their voice, and the next phase of ToneTag’s growth