As a research scientist and teacher, he worked for 14 years in BARC and later ventured into business. An infecting motivator, he has succeeded in converting educated as employable, graduates as professionals, individuals as entrepreneurs, vendors as partners, family members as wealth creators and of course by his unique way of transforming intimidating problems into opportunities for prosperity.

Later, he moved to North America working with financial product companies helping them build better Payment Solutions; but his passion for entrepreneurship pulled him back to India. Here he patented few of his ideas and entered into the world of entrepreneurship and co-founded www.autowale.inalong with his college friend. Autowale, hailed by media as Uber of Auto-Rickshaws, was world's first auto-rickshaw aggregator, for which Autowale was featured by national and International media including New York Times and Forbes. Janardan has been listed by FastCompany as Most Creative people in Business 2015 for solving the rickshaw hailing problem in India.

Before joining Knowlarity recently, Janardan was Chief Business Officer at Opinio, hyperlocal logistics company based out of Bangalore.

Janardan is married to Dr. Shalini Saxena, PhD from IIT Delhi and PostDoc from MGH & Harvard Medical School, who’s currently enjoying quality time with her 2 years old daughter Aarya. When he is not in office or home, he is playing tennis with his friends.

Viraj follows his philosophy of creating new opportunities through disruption. While many jobs are being replaced by automation and AI, he is building the human jobs of the future. He has rich experience in business transformation through major initiatives on organisation architecture and system enhancement, culture engineering, strategic decision-making and customer orientation. Recently he has also mastered the art of building a company from scratch and scaling it in a sustainable fashion.

He is a turnaround specialist and a champion of change management, leadership development and lean philosophy. While leading a 1000 person organization from the age of 22, Kalyani Forge, over a short time span, he brought steady growth in cash flows, the true success milestone of lean journey, enhanced facilities and new business orders worth 70 cr or 30% of existing revenues in the company.

Viraj is known for his highly professional approach when it comes to management and strives to benchmark with the best in the world. He developed an internal system called the Kalyani Operating System to scale up and systematize operations and meet increasingly complex demands from customers with ease. He continues to grasp the latest management ideas and implements them and devotes time to training his team. He promotes entrepreneurial ventures both inside and outside of the company.

Viraj graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and completed the Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology, a rigorous and selective dual-degree program, with a Bachelor of Science in Economics (Finance) at the Wharton School and a Bachelor of Science in Engineering (Mechanical) at the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Viraj is a firm believer in the potential of India and ties his ambitions to the growth of the country. He served on the Executive Committee of Young Indians, Pune, for three years. He was Chairman of Yi Pune in 2015-16, being the youngest Chairman in the country, and collaborated with CII on youth leadership projects, where young entrepreneurs come together to discuss and build the new business ecosystems. He also delivers talks in various educational forums & is closely associated with young talent.

Viraj promotes interdisciplinary learning and takes interest in various areas like economics, arts, philosophy, politics and applies them to business. He is an avid reader & is inspired by work.

His book Patanjalize Your Brand is India's first business book on Patanjali.

He is a strong believer in the Indian culture, science and arts.

He comes from a family of teachers and is passionate about helping the youth go beyond their comfort zones and be fearless.

He has been an active part of the Indian startup ecosystem and has worked with high growth companies like hike, Jabong, PayUmoney, TiE.

He is reachable at:
Email: paritosh@paritoshsharma.com
Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/paritoshsh

Winner of the Start-Up of the Year 2014 award by Silicon India. SillyMonks is a large digital player in Tollywood, Mollywood & Kollywood and has Music verticals branded as SillyMonks Music & Monkstar.To support all these Sillymonks operates an Event Management Company called EventMonks.

Sanjay stepped into the world of Cinema by becoming a Producer and launching Miss India Universe 1999 Gul Panag[2] for the critically acclaimed Bollywood film, Dhoop[3](2003), also starring Om Puri, Revathi & Sanjay Suri along with his friends. Later he Executive Produced two Telugu films Masth & Manorama for Zee Motion Pictures. Apart from being a producer he moved on to the silver screen as an actor as well. Till date he has acted in 11 films.

Mahesh’s entrepreneurial journey began in 2006 when he co-founded one of India’s early home delivery solutions in the B2C space. He then went on to playing a more active role on the investment side, first on the stock market and subsequently in angel investing and advisory.

Mahesh is now a Partner with Anthill Ventures where he manages innovation programs bringing startups and enterprises together to co-innovate. He conducts a number of workshops focused on helping startups scale, and is active in coaching & mentoring entrepreneurs. He is an active speaker and writer on Corporate Innovation programs.

He is an avid automobile enthusiast and loves to travel.

Pranitha Subhash is an Indian film actress & model who predominantly appears in Kannada, Telugu and Tamil films. She was raised in Bangalore and pursued a career in modeling before plunging into films. Her parents are doctors and run their own hospital in Bengaluru.

She debuted as an actor in the 2010 Kannada film, Porki, a remake of Telugu film Pokiri and till date acted in 24 South Indian Films. Pranitha also does endorsements with leading Fashion, clothing, jewellery, Lifestyle & Sports Brand.

She has acted with most of the top male stars in the south Indian film industry like Surya Shivakumar, Karthi Shivakumar, Siddarth Narayanan, Pavan Kalyan, Mahesh Babu, Vishnu Manchu, Manoj Manchu, Dharshan, Upendra to name a few.

Her company Merxius has been featured across media channels for its ground breaking work, including The Hindu, Deccan Chronicle, TOI, Saakshi, Eenadu, Vogue, CNBC among others. Its VR product RED is a first of its kind Virtual Reality content enabler. Think Photoshop for VR. #AnyBodyCanVR Mail RED@Merxius.in to trial it.

She debuted as an actor in the 2010 Kannada film, Porki, a remake of Telugu film Pokiri and till date acted in 24 South Indian Films. Pranitha also does endorsements with leading Fashion, clothing, jewellery, Lifestyle & Sports Brand.

She has acted with most of the top male stars in the south Indian film industry like Surya Shivakumar, Karthi Shivakumar, Siddarth Narayanan, Pavan Kalyan, Mahesh Babu, Vishnu Manchu, Manoj Manchu, Dharshan, Upendra to name a few.

He also has an interest in the start-up space – playing the role of a mentor and coach for start-ups in the past 6 years. He is the founding partner of Xseed Consulting, an investment and advisory firm for start-ups, which has a portfolio of 12 companies.

His earlier stints include heading a profit center at ICICI Bank (2000-2005), CFO of a biofuels company (funded by Ventureast, 2005-2008) and managing coal mine investments in Indonesia and Australia (2008-2010). Jagannath’s education includes a degree in Mechanical Engineering and MBA in Finance from IIM Lucknow.

Jagannath Samavedam has joined the Ventureast team as a Principal in October 2010 and was elevated to Partner position in May 2016. He manages a diverse portfolio of healthcare and cleantech investments. He led Ventureast’s investments in companies focused on medical devices, healthcare delivery, diagnostics and renewable energy.

He was earlier a Senior Principal at Advaita Energy Advisors, a PE fund focused on energy investments. At Advaita he was responsible for identifying investment opportunities in Indonesia and Australia. He had successfully completed acquisition of a listed company on Jakarta Stock Exchange which was used as a vehicle for holding Advaita’s coal mining investments. Prior to this, Jagannath was the CFO of Naturol Bioenergy Ltd, India’s first fully integrated biodiesel plant that successfully shipped biodiesel to Europe, complying with their stringent standards. He was instrumental in raising $35 million from Private Equity players (including VenturEast) and Banks.

Jagannath also has extensive experience in project finance and corporate banking through his 11 year stint with ICICI Bank, India’s leading private bank where he was the Zonal head of corporate banking for the states of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. This gave him an opportunity to work with the leading companies in the region for structuring financial solutions to their requirements. He has an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management and a Bachelor of Engineering from the Osmania University.

Sold off and completed handed over of AasaanPay.com, India's first M PoS, which is into simplifying offline payments while creating delight to Merchants and their customers.

He consider execution, technology and predicting technology vectors evolution to be his forte. He have a strong record of accomplishment in planning and execution of very diverse projects in terms of technology and areas. He have a voracious appetite for learning and experience of implementing new things successfully.

Goal-oriented, optimistic and enthusiastic.

Specialties: Value creation, Bootstrapper, Product Development and Creative problem solving.

Prior to Endiya, Abhishek was a part of the investment team at Ventureast. His other experiences span CYIENT, where he was responsible for the firm’s M&As, strategy development & incubations, and PwC, where his skills were utilised at the Transaction Advisory Team. Before PwC, Abhishek worked as a consultant with the strategy and operations group at Deloitte Consulting where he advised several global clients on pre & post-merger strategies, market entry and growth expansion blueprints. He also worked with Tata Consultancy Services, as Engineer/ Account Manager, handling enterprise Product Development projects and Business Development.

In 1995, he founded South Asian Bar Association of Southern California (SABA).

In 1997, he founded The Indus Entrepeneurs (TiE), Southern California.

In 2003, he was the founder president of the North American South Asian Bar Association (www.NASABA.com), a nationwide body representing 10,000 south Asian lawyers in the U.S. and Canada.

He is or has been on the boards of:

American India Foundation

Asia Society of Southern California

India Community Center (ICC)

Pratham USA

Sikh Center of OC

Habib American Bank

Ignify – an IT Consulting Firm

Premier Media, Inc., publisher of "India Journal".

Conceptualized on the lines of purity and quality, the brand stands for healthy and tasty organic food. In addition to that, Terra Greens, aims to revive sustainable agricultural practices in India through organic farming by marrying traditional knowledge with modern technology.

Born in Hyderabad and brought up in Assam, last year Likitha adopted 4000 farmers in Tamil Nadu to meet the growing need for organic staples and encourage organic food cultivation and will continue to adopt farmers from different region in India. Terra Greens range of 99 organic staples products is focussed on nutrition for the urban Indian.

Aditya has been an integral part of startup ecosystem in India for nearly 10 years. He evaluated and funded many startup companies as part of various VC funds including Ventureast. He co-founded Yaksha Fund Advisors, Chennai. Aditya served as the first manager of Incubation Centre IIT Patna - India's first government funded incubator in ESDM with an emphasis on medical electronics - and helped set up the incubator.

He is a Mechanical Engineer with an MBA in Marketing.

A public speaker and a regular at round table discussions, she was also featured in the #DarkIsBeautiful photo exhibition in Hyderabad and believes in using both media an social media for the larger good.

She is currently working on Project Amulet. By combining Bio-Sensors and Sub 1GHz IOT communication - Amulet is redefining emergency response for medical and physical threats.

Spriha is excited about the potential impact of this technology towards Women's Safety and will be unveiling the product via the XPRIZE Womens Safety Challenge 2017.

During her free time, she dabbles with surreal photo manipulation and gastronomy.

Established more than 14000 water, waste treatment and purification plants having a PAN India presence and crossing the boundaries across the globe; processing 13,000 million liters of water per day. Successfully established nearly 1900 complete water treatment plants across India.