Forbes India - Tech Conversations

In this episode, Arpit Agarwal, a partner at Blume Ventures, talks about how he sees India’s deep-tech ecosystem growing. Returns on successful deep-tech companies can be impressive, but the ecosystem will need to find ways to match the money for long-gestation projects with focused execution, Agarwal says. Even as the next generation of deep science and engineering-based startups begin to emerge in India, long-term capital is necessary, especially in sectors such as life sciences, for example.

Sriram K Rajamani, corporate vice president and managing director of Microsoft Research India Lab, reflects on how computer science and engineering research has evolved at the centre, in Bengaluru. In this conversation, Rajamani touches upon how AI and large language models can be harnessed to solve local needs, some of the technical aspects of how modern AI models work, and best practices from the research lab that could apply to India’s deep tech ecosystem.

In this episode, Woodside touched upon topics including the timing of his taking over the top job from Freshworks founder Girish Mathrubootham, who plans to focus on the company’s products strategy, how Freshworks might get to its first target of a billion dollars in revenue by 2026, and how Dennis views India – not only from the point of view of technical talent, but also as a market as Freshworks evolves into a larger enterprise software company.

Agnikul Cosmos made a bit of Indian spacefaring history with the successful test of their Agnibaan SOrTeD (sub orbital technology demonstrator) rocket, which lifted off and flew as intended, on May 30. In this episode, recorded on June 6, Co-Founder and CEO Srinath Ravichandran and early investor Vishesh Rajaram, founding managing partner of Speciale Invest, offer a glimpse behind the scenes and into what was going on in their minds.

In this episode, Dennis Gada, Executive Vice President and Global Head of Banking and Financial Services at Infosys, talks about how banks are looking to tap digitalisation and what they are looking for from their IT vendors. Gada, who is also a member on the board of EdgeVerve Systems, Infosys’s products and platforms business, also talks about how core banking software is evolving in the age of AI.

In this episode, Vineet Dravid, Co-Founder and CEO of Oorja Energy, talks about his ambition of building a world-class deep tech company from Bengaluru, in the field of computer-aided engineering. Vineet gives us an update on the physics and machine learning based simulation and analytics product Oorja has developed. While the product is relevant to many industries, an immediate application is in the electric vehicles sector and the startup has already won customers including large OEMs in the US and Europe.

In this episode, Euro Beinat, global head, AI and data science at Prosus, and his colleague Paul Van Der Boor, senior director, data science, explain how they went about building a 1000-person AI ecosystem across the global technology investor’s companies, around the globe. They also talk about Prosus’s internal AI efforts and what they learnt, for example, when an AI assistant they’d developed and introduced in team environments resulted in user behaviour that surprised them.

In this episode, Peter J Arduini, president and CEO of GE HealthCare Technologies, talks about his plan to expand R&D and manufacturing in India. GE HealthCare has committed to investing a billion dollars in expanding these capabilities via its local joint venture Wipro GE HealthCare — a partnership that’s endured over more than three decades. Arduini also talks about how India is uniquely positioned to take ownership of more GE HealthCare product development because of its software prowess and growing applied AI capabilities. 

In this episode, Nimeet Dhokai, co-founder of Happi Planet Eco Products, talks about how he and his friend Mayank Gupta started their venture, determined to convert consumers to sustainable home care products. The two-year-old startup is backed by investors including 100X.VC and Fireside Ventures. Dhokai also talks about how he and Gupta found a successful combination of effective products and meeting consumers’ perception of cleanliness, while sticking to their goal of producing genuinely sustainable cleaners.

In this episode, Jaya Jagadish, Country Head and Senior Vice President at AMD India, talks about why the company is very optimistic about the prospects of India’s fledgling semiconductor ecosystem over the next decade. Jaya also talks about how, over the last 20 years, AMD India has become the company’s biggest global R&D location at a time when the multinational chip maker is ramping up its efforts to produce processors specifically suited for artificial intelligence applications.