Kiran Bettadapur is a Director at Blaze Ventures and a highly regarded polymath in the Indian startup ecosystem. With a rare combination of professional qualifications, he is a seasoned entrepreneur, angel investor, patent attorney, and Supreme Court advocate. He is an alumnus of both IIT Kharagpur and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. Throughout his career, Mr. Bettadapur has held senior leadership roles at global firms like HCL-Hewlett Packard and Birlasoft before transitioning into a mentor and advisor for the Government of Karnataka to revamp the state's innovation ecosystem. An expert in Intellectual Property (IP), market-oriented innovation, and business scalability, he frequently delivers masterclasses for organizations like TiE. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed book, “Gita and the Art of Selling.”

Mr. Akhil G is the Head of Data & AI for Powertrain Engineering at Mercedes-Benz Research and Development India. With nearly a decade of experience at the intersection of artificial intelligence, digital transformation, and business strategy, he leads enterprise Data and AI initiatives driving innovation in automotive engineering.

He has played a key role in establishing Generative AI capabilities and fostering a data-driven leadership culture within the organization. His expertise spans enterprise AI strategy, digital product development, business and P&L leadership, and large-scale digital transformation.

Akhil holds an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad and a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee.

Sundara Nagarajan ("SN") is the Managing Director of Innovation Scaleup Advisors (ISA), an enterprise development firm that helps innovation-driven enterprises grow business outcomes.

ISA serves deep-tech & digital-tech ventures, enterprises transforming or diversifying, incubators, and investors. SN is an accomplished technologist with over four decades of experience in large global enterprises and early-stage companies.

Prior to ISA, SN served global technology majors NetApp, HP, Philips, and Wipro. He also served IIIT-Bangalore, IndusAge Partners, IPValue, and Bluefont. He is an alumnus of IIT Madras and GEC, Thrissur. He authored “This Book is Not for Edison

Girish Kharosekar brings over 27 years of extensive experience across a broad spectrum of finance functions and diverse industries.

Over the course of his career, he has held senior finance leadership and CFO roles at leading organizations, including Intel India, Intel Malaysia, Cisco Systems, Sasken, and Pandorum Technologies.

He currently leads Scalewise Advisors LLP, a CFO advisory firm, where he provides strategic financial guidance to deep-tech startups and fund allocators, including Category II AIFs and accelerators.

Girish holds an engineering degree from the College of Engineering, Pune, a postgraduate degree in Management Studies from IISc Bangalore, and has completed a Management Program at the Kellogg School of Management, Illinois.

Anju is a Partner at IvyCap Ventures. She works through the Leading Institute Alumni Ecosystems of India to bring together investors, domain experts, corporate leaders, government representatives, founders, and academia to collaboratively foster research, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Through our Endowment Model, we work with India's leading academic institutions—partnering with alumni who are committed to giving back through their time, capital, and networks. The aim is to enable a bold, future-ready, lab-to-market startup ecosystem.

Anju has a B.Tech from IIT Delhi, and an MS./ Ph.D. from Stanford University. She has over 15 years of experience in product management and marketing in the financial risk industry in the USA. She worked in the field of Disaster Risk Management, building financial models for disaster risk for organizations such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Office of Emergency Services, PG&E, and the world’s leading Re/Insurance companies, and risk managers in the commercial sector.

In the startup ecosystem for 8 Plus years, she is passionate about working with young entrepreneurs and driving IvyCap Ventures efforts to support and build out the next generation of entrepreneurs leveraging India’s Alumni Ecosystem across academia, industry and government.

Abhishek Upperwal is the Founder of Soket AI, a research-driven AI lab focused on ethical Artificial General Intelligence. He holds a Master’s in Computational Data Science from IISc Bangalore, specializing in High-Performance Computing, Distributed Systems, and Large-Scale Model Training. With an expertise in CUDA optimizations, MPI, and graph algorithms, he architected Pragna-1B, a 1.25 billion parameter foundation model built from scratch for Hindi, English, Gujarati, and Bengali, featuring one of the most efficient Indic tokenizers. He is also the Principal Investigator of Project EKA under the IndiaAI Mission to build state-of-the-art multilingual AI models that aim to surpass global benchmarks.