Grand Jury & Mentors

Dr. Pradeep Gupta is the Chairman of the CyberMedia Group, the specialty media house, with brands like Dataquest, PCQuest, Voice&Data, DARE, CIOL, Global Services, etc. Pradeep is an Angel investor and has mentored over 250 start-ups. Pradeep was conferred the “National Entrepreneurship Award as the Best Mentor” by the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, Government of India. He is on the Investment Management Committee of the 10,000 crore ‘Fund of Funds’ set up by the Government of India. Pradeep is the Chief Mentor of Electropreneur Park, Delhi & Bhubaneshwar. He is the co-founder of Indian Angel Network, Asia’s largest angel network. Pradeep was a global trustee of TiE, the world’s largest entrepreneurial ecosystem across 17 countries. He Chairs the IIT Alumni Trust of IvyCap Ventures. He is/has been on the Boards of UTI AMC, IIT Mandi, Indian Newspaper Society, IIT Delhi incubator, IIM Calcutta Innovation Park, IIT Startups, Lemon Tree Hotels, etc. He has been the past President of PanIIT India and Association of Indian Magazines. He is the recipient of the Distinguished Alumni award of IIT Delhi and IIM Calcutta and the Helen Keller award for working in the disability sector.Pradeep is an Engineer from IIT Delhi (1975) and an MBA from IIM Calcutta (1977). He was conferred an Honorary Doctorate by Rai University (2022).

Ms. Meher Pudumjee is the Chairperson of Thermax Ltd, a company focused on providing sustainable energy and environment solutions. A postgraduate in Chemical Engineering from the Imperial College of Science & Technology, London, Meher joined Thermax as a trainee engineer in August 1990. After her return to India in 1996, she was appointed to the Board of Directors and worked closely in the finance function of Thermax. She was also involved with overseeing a Joint Venture Company focused on drinking water, as well as the Air Pollution Control businesses of the company. Meher took over as Chairperson in 2004, after the retirement of Mrs. Anu Aga. Meher is a philanthropist and musician and on the Boards of multiple ‘not for profit’ organisations.

Mr. Sangeet Kumar is the CEO & Co-Founder, Addverb Technologies, a global Robotics Company in India that automates intralogistics operations and makes the businesses future-ready. An alumnus of IIT Kharagpur, Sangeet brings 2 decades of experience of process automation and material handling automation. He has extensive experience in Robotics, high-speed packing machines, Automated Storage and Retrieval System, warehouse design and engineering, etc.Prior to founding Addverb, he had more than a decade long stint with Asian Paints where he played a pivotal role in setting up India’s most automated factories and warehouses with state-of-the-art robotics and automation systems. In the initial years of his stint with Asian Paints, he successfully designed and commissioned two of the most automated paint factories in the world at Chennai & Rohtak.

Ruyintan (Ron) E. Mehta was a serial entrepreneur in several plastics manufacturing businesses in the US and Canada for over 25 years. After his retirement, Ron has been involved full time in technology-enabled philanthropy and higher education in India.
Ron is the Executive Director of WIN Foundation that was spawned out of Wheels Global Foundation to support innovations and fund novel programs in Water and Sanitation (WATSAN) and Maternal and Child Health (MCH) issues in India. Many IITs in India - IITB, IITGN and IITKGP and several highly respected NGOs in India are beneficiaries of over $2 million in grants awarded by WIN Foundation to address WATSAN and MCH issues in India. Ron is the current Director of IIT Gandhinagar Foundation and previously served as President of IIT Bombay Heritage Foundation.
Ron holds a B Tech (Chemical Engineering' 70), from IIT Bombay and Masters degrees in Chemical Engineering and Engineering Administration from the University of Connecticut and the University of Utah respectively.

Mansi is passionate about developing scalable solutions that tackle problems at the intersection of environment and development, with a particular interest in water and sanitation problems.

Gagan loves discussing technology disruptions with founders, and is one of the most well-known faces of the IIT-Bombay and Mumbai entrepreneur community.
He built a robotics and science learning company that he exited in 2015. His most fulfilling accomplishment is creating a passionate and high-energy work culture that led to the development of an innovative and IP-driven product that customers loved. Before India Quotient, he was an active angel investor in about 24 well-known startups, with 5 exits to date. He is excited about businesses around consumer hardware, technology, and learning, and would love the startup world to be more ‘frugal, efficient, and sane’.

Samir is an experienced system trader who trades across a range of financial instruments using trend following techniques. He also dabbles in options trades as well as mean reversion trades, has a strong background in python, financial analysis, statistical techniques and trading psychology.

After graduating from Indian Institute of Technology in 1970, Sudarshan founded Technocraft Industries with his brother. The company began by making sheet metal components and special tools for international tractors, built steel drum closures, and then built a worldwide monopoly for an American multinational company for over two decades. Sudarshan holds eight patents on drum closures.Since its inception in sheet metal, Technocraft has also grown to become a leading global manufacturer of scaffolding systems, an industry considered hazardous in the US and western Europe.
The trust founded by Sudarshan and his brother runs subsidised vocational courses in tool making, die making, and Mechatronics in Murbad, Mumbai and supports a number of charities at the same time. Children from tribal communities receive free education, lodging, and food.
Sudarshan with his brother also funded Alma Mater in Bombay to set up a centre for applied artificial intelligence. The centre is known as the Technocraft centre for artificial intelligence.

Prof Subramaniam Chandramouli is an Associate Professor at the Department of Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay), Mumbai. He is a recipient of the prestigious Swarnajayani Fellowship in the field of chemical sciences for his work generating „green heat‟ from solar energy for various practical applications. His application-oriented fundamental research is focused on understanding the electrical and thermal transport properties of various nanomaterials and thereby developing applications in domains of energy harvesting sensors and energy plosives and more. storage. Also developing Nanoparticles to ‘sniff’ cancer, explosives and more. Dr Chandramouli holds a PhD from IIT Madras and a Postdoc, from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan. And Technology Research Association for Single Wall Carbon Nanotubes (TASC), Japan.

Abhishek Jain is is a Center for Military Airworthiness and Certification (CEMILAC, Govt of India) certified engineer for design of propellers/fans, technical documentation, and aerodynamics. Abhishek has made more than 15 technical and managerial contributions to reputed conferences and Journal and the. winner of Lockheed Martin Innovation Medal, among various other awards and achievements. He is the founding Chairman SIDM Start-up Forum, Co-Chairman of FICCI Taskforce on Defence Technology and a mentor to start-ups at SINE, IIT Bombay and many other Forums. Abhishek holds a master’s degree in technology from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay with Aerodynamics (CFD) as specialization.

Prof. Lakshmi Narayan's research is focused on understanding the multiscale processing-structure-property correlations in advanced materials such as additively manufactured or 3D printed metals and alloys, nanoglasses, metallic glasses and their composites, Mg alloys and high temperature Ni based superalloys. He also investigates aspects of fracture, fatigue and indentation of materials. Prior to IIT Delhi, Dr. Lakshmi Narayan was a visiting scientist in Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China. He has been a recipient of the Gopalakrishnan-NTU Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship in Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and worked with the Singapore Centre for 3D printing (SC3DP). Dr. Narayan holds B. Tech. from VNIT, Nagpur and received his PhD from the IISc, Bangalore. Following this, he joined Carnegie Mellon University as a Postdoctoral Fellow.

Prof Dhariwal teaches courses in Mechanical and IoT based prototyping. He is also the Faculty in Charge of the Makerspace in IIT Delhi. Prof. Dhariwal’s research interest is mostly in designing for health and wellness in the built environment, design for environmental sustainability and medical devices. His areas of specialisation are Building Science, Product Design, Mechatronics, Thermal and Fluid Engineering. In his student days, Prof. Dhariwal has been the winner of student modelling competition at 14th IBPSA conference BS2015,. He has received the best paper award in Ph.D. student competition in BSA 2015, 2nd IBPSA-Italy Conference, 2015. He is a part of 4-member sub-team that won honorable mention in sustainability jury in Solar Decathlon Europe 2014 and many more. He did his B.Tech from IIT Guwahati where he won a silver medal for being the top student in B.Tech. He did his M.S. in Industrial Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA. He earned his Ph.D. from IIT Bombay and he has a Fab Academy Diploma in digital fabrication directed by Prof Neil Gershenfeld, Centre for Bits and Atoms, MIT,Cambridge, USA.

Paresh Vora is the Director, India Operations at WIN Foundation which supports bringing innovations for sustainable social impact in (i) Water and Sanitation and (ii) Mother and Child Health. Paresh has over 28 years of experience in diverse high technology industries, including IT systems, peripherals, telecom, software and engineering. He has held senior positions in organizations like the Indian subsidiary of Dover Corporation; Bridgeline (a US software company), Epson India, a unit of Seiko Epson Corporation, Japan; Sasken Communication Technology Ltd. He has also worked in the higher education sector and has led the project to set up TeamLease Skills University, Gujarat and was its first President. He worked with Ahmedabad University, where he headed the Technology Startup Incubator and Quality Assurance for the University. Paresh has a B.Tech.(Electrical Engineering) from IIT Bombay and PGDM from IIM Ahmedabad.

Manish is a passionate technology enthusiast with 18+ years of experience and a record of nurturing high-performance teams. He has led projects across diverse environments in Product development, Enterprise Software Implementation & Integration and enhancing business transformation systems. Manish joined Addverb Technologies in 2018 and is now leading the organization’s Software and Mobile Robotics team.