Forbes India - Tech Conversations
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Venwiz's founders on plans for their industrial services SaaS platform after a recent funding
In this episode, Rajesh Reddy and Sandesh Paturi, founders of Venwiz, in Bengaluru, talk about how their own experience in figuring out the right vendors for various manufacturing projects validated their idea that there was an opportunity to drag industrial services into the internet age — connecting large buyers with MSME vendors across the country. The duo have raised $8.3 million in Series A funding led by Sorin Investments with existing investors Accel and Nexus Venture Partners joining in. They had previously raised $3 million in seed funding
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The Big Picture: Debashis Chatterjee on completing LTIMindtree's integration, and strategy ahead
In this episode, Debashis Chatterjee, CEO and managing director at LTIMindtree talks about the successful integration of LTI and Mindtree that has resulted in a $3.5 billion IT services enterprise, ready to take on larger rivals for bigger orders, while retaining the characteristics of a smaller, nimbler operator. Chatterjee, widely credited with successfully integrating the two diverse companies, explains why he thinks LTIMindtree has what it takes to become a significantly larger IT provider over the next few years
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Rohan Verma at MapMyIndia on the consumer hardware opportunity in navigation and connected vehicles
In this episode, Rohan Verma, CEO and executive director at CE Info Systems, better known as MapMyIndia, talks about why the company is expanding its hardware products business into the consumer segment, offering sophisticated trackers, 'navi-tainment' units and in-helmet, handsfree, smart-navigation assistance. Rohan also talks about how MapMyIndia is becoming an anchor platform for startups to innovate on, building products for both enterprise customers and consumers. One exciting example is a product, currently, under development in collaboration with a startup in Bengaluru, that
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Keshav Murugesh at WNS on three recent acquisitions, and why every global CEO is looking at India
In this episode, Keshav Murugesh, group CEO at WNS, talks about every global CEO is trying to figure out how to tap India's tech services capabilities. This has also opened up opportunities for companies like WNS, which are coming into their own, as multinational billion-dollar revenue businesses, to manage or even take over their clients' BPM units. Keshav also talks about three recent acquisitions that WNS has made, spending some $320 million, the capabilities they bring, and what the deals show about where the company is headed
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Sudhir Singh on the culture that powers the $2 billion ambition at Coforge
In this episode, Sudhir Singh, CEO and executive director at Coforge, one of India's well-known mid-cap IT services providers, talks about how the company is set to more than double its annual revenues to a billion dollars, for the current fiscal year, compared with five years ago. He also talks about the culture, which he says is a fancy word for the lived experience of the employees in the company—something on which Coforge has not economized, Singh says—that supports the 22,500-strong IT provider's ambition to double its revenues again
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Ashish Khushu at LTTS on the impact of convergence of technologies, and the changing role of the CTO
In this episode, Ashish Khushu, CTO at Larsen & Toubro Technology Services, India's biggest pure-play engineering services provider, talks about the company's six big bets, and how its engineers are co-innovating with experts from some of the biggest enterprises in the world. LTTS, a Mumbai-listed company, today has about 22,000 employees and revenues of close to a billion dollars. Ashish also talks about the changing role of the CTO in a world where change isn't being driven only by new technology, but by the convergence of multiple technologies and their applications
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Neil Shah at Counterpoint on why India remains a bright spot for Apple
Neil Shah, vice president of research at Counterpoint Research, explains why more people are buying iPhones in India, and why the country has become important to Apple's strategy. Apple's latest quarterly numbers reflected the ongoing problems the tech giant is facing — including production headwinds in China, and consumers becoming circumspect. Amid what CEO Tim Cook called a "challenging environment," India remained a bright spot for the iPhone maker, although, by revenue, local sales here contribute only a small proportion of Apple's total business
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Sateesh Seetharamiah, CEO of Infosys's EdgeVerve, on how the cost of intelligence might go down to zero
Sateesh Seetharamiah, CEO of EdgeVerve Systems, products and platforms subsidiary of Infosys, talks about why it is inevitable that everything that can be automated, especially in the enterprise business context, will eventually get automated. The idea of what is automatable is changing every day, he points out — just look at the capabilities of ChatGPT. Sateesh also talks about the three digital platforms at EdgeVerve that today some 400 of the world's 2000 biggest companies are using. He leaves you with a point to ponder—what if the cost of intelligence were to become zero?
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Gopichand Katragadda on million-dollar customer opportunities for Myelin Foundry's edge AI solutions
In this episode, Gopichand Katragadda talks about turning entrepreneur as the next phase in a career that includes leading the GE John F. Welch Technology Center in India and being CTO of Tata Group. Four years ago, Katragadda co-founded Myelin Foundry with Ganesh Suryanarayanan to develop "global first" AI products for applications at the edge. In this conversation, he talks about the significance of the name of his company, innovations that customers are already paying for, the team at Myelin, $3 million in recent funding, and growth prospects
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Satvik Jagannath at Vitra.ai on building one-click translation on the fly for 75 languages
In this episode, Satvik K Jagannath, co-founder and CEO of Vitra.ai, talks about his company's context-based translation technology that is being used by some of India's biggest companies and startups — from HDFC Bank to Swiggy. Satvik and his school buddy co-founder Akash Nidhi PS have raised about $571,000 in seed funding from investors including 100X.VC and Inflexor Ventures for their Bengaluru startup. They've built a 25-member team and are currently in talks for a series A round of investment. Expanding into the US, where they already have a customer, and adding emoti
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Yamini Bhat and Venkat Malladi on learning as founders, 140 pct NRR, and the next phase of growth at Vymo
In this episode, Yamini Bhat and Venkat Malladi, co-founders of Vymo talk about how their 10-year-old venture has found traction for its financial industry focused sales engagement cloud software in the US, Japan, India and five other markets. The company enjoys a net retention rate of 140 percent, they say, putting them among the best SaaS businesses, on that metric — widely used to get a sense of how well a subscription-based cloud business is doing. They also talk about learning to traverse the changing landscape of challenges as they grew to a 500-person team over the last several ye