Our Featured Speakers

Dr Lalitesh Katragadda is a pioneer in crowdsourcing. His creation, Google Map Maker, quadrupled the world's digital maps corpus, bringing maps to 4 billion in 187 countries that had no maps before. His startup was Google’s first acquisition in 2002 after which he co-founded Google India, acting as Country Head, Google India Products until 2014.

He now builds population scale platforms for India's Billion including Avanti for financial inclusion and Indihood, crowdsourcing for communities and core development challenges. He architected the Fiber Grid for the state of Andhra, the worlds largest greenfield optical network in 2014, authored India’s national Open API policy, is an advisor to MEITY and core contributor to Digitial India and India Stack.

Lalitesh has spoken at TED and The White House.

Lalitesh received his Ph.D. and MS from CMU in Robotics and Computer Science, where he led the CMU Lunar Rover Initiative. He holds an MS, Design Division, Stanford, MS, Aerospace, Iowa State and B-Tech, IIT-Bombay.

Sunil Rao now a partner at Lightspeed Ventures led strategic partner development, VCs and startups in Google India where he was instrumental in driving its mentoring program, Google Launchpad to support startups in the country.

Sunil will talk about how start-ups, aggregators and open innovation might disrupt large industries and the public sector using convenience, tech and change in consumption patterns.

Nikhil Kumar led a team to set up BHIM – based on UPI technology in 3 weeks. He’s a leading voice of fin-tech in India and he head of Development Ecosystem at India Stack, a set of APIs that allows the government, startups, and developers to leverage a unique digital infrastructure to address problems.

Nikhil will talk about how will Digital India disrupt traditional players, credit cards and open up the economy for the next billion.

Vishal Gurbaxani has been working on & studying the interaction of technology and business for decades with special emphasis on blockchain and marketing and content. At his company Captiv8, he’s exploring how AI driving content and marketing campaigns will disrupt the world of media. At CoinTheory, his team is exploring what tokenization would mean for the investment world.

His talk at FutureBets will illustrate how tech and business is transforming and how to be ‘on top’ of the disruption revolution.

Praneet Kumar is the Founding Partner Of PKA (Praneet Kumar & Associates) - an integrated boutique consulting firm focussed on techno-legal business solutioning. He is also the co-founder of Global Blockchain Foundation and is working on bringing the world together on blockchain technology and it’s allied emerging techno-sectoral applications through the World Blockchain Summit.

He describes himself as “an entrepreneur with a passion for Emerging Technologies, Mind of Lawyer, a Heart for Technology and a Soul for Community”.

Alok Anil is the co-founder of Next Big Innovation Labs which is working on a breakthrough 3D Bio-Printing technology that will make critical life saving medication much more affordable and also reduce the dependence on animal testing by the cosmetic R&D industry.

He also contributes to The World Economic Forum Agenda, on topics of personal and professional interests like Exponential Technologies, Technology For Social Good, Future of Work, 3D Printing, BRICS, United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 9 - Industry, Innovation, Infrastructure.

Vasanth Kamath is the founder of Hydrogreens which is on a mission to reduce water usage in agriculture, grow more organic fresh greens per square foot & while doing so improve the power & income of our farming community. His current venture has designed a moisture farming climate cell for small & medium dairy farmers to harvest fodder and Microgreens with 97% reduction in water usage & annual electric bill less than a dollar. He was a former Director of Innovation at Target Corporation where he explored the future of food with MIT. He’s been able to grow cotton with 98% less water, create climate models to understand agriculture better and saved a million cats with code.

Vasanth will speak on the future of agriculture and food production using technology and what it means for the consumption patterns of the country.

Sriram Kuchimanchi is a global expert on sustainability and policy & the founder of Smarter Dharma – an organization that builds solutions around sustainability and partners with government agencies to build policy. Sriram’s team created India’s first carbon neutral conference and residential complex.

At Future Bets, Sriram will speak about how the increasing gravitas towards sustainability could shift real estate, services, create new players in public markets and disrupt old ones.

Rohit Varma Alluri works as the Head of Research at ZPX, a Singapore-based boutique Blockchain services firm that is focused
on building pre-eminent financial services for cryptocurrencies.

Rohit also co-authors an industry leading crypto newsletter called "Satoshi & Co" that produces daily thematic content aimed at educating more and more readers about what is happening in the crypto space.  

Rohit has previously worked with JP Morgan as an Equity Research Analyst in Mumbai and holds a Bachelors degree in Engineering from IIT Madras.