The Jury 2023

Founder & Director – Kotak Mahindra Bank

Uday Suresh Kotak is an Indian banker and Founder of Kotak Mahindra Bank. In the early 1980s, while India was still a closed economy and economic growth was muted, Kotak decided to start out on his own, refusing a lucrative job option from a multinational. Over the next few years, he diversified his business into various areas of financial services, establishing a prominent presence in bill discounting, stockbroking, investment banking, car finance, life insurance, and mutual funds. On 22 March 2003, Kotak Mahindra Finance Ltd. became India’s first finance company to receive a banking license from the Reserve Bank of India.

Chairman – Manipal Group

Dr. Ranjan Pai is an Indian medical doctor, businessperson, and chairman of the Manipal Education and Medical Group, which runs six universities and twenty-eight hospitals across the globe. Pai’s Manipal University has overseas campuses in Malaysia, Antigua, Dubai and Nepal. He acquired a 51% stake in Cigna TTK Health Insurance and renamed it as Manipal Cigna Health Insurance. In 2021, Manipal Hospitals acquired the Columbia Asia Hospitals chain for $315 million, followed by Vikram Hospital in Bangalore. In January 2023, he invested $2 million in Kites Senior Care, a Bangalore-based provider of services for those suffering from dementia.

CEO – Flipkart Group

Kalyan Krishnamurthy is the CEO of Flipkart Group which operates its flagship marketplace Flipkart, Myntra, and Cleartrip. Under his leadership, in 2018, the etailer orchestrated the biggest-ever e-commerce exit globally when Walmart agreed to buy the majority of the firm for $16 billion. Prior to joining Flipkart, Krishnamurthy served as the Director of Finance and Portfolio Companies at Tiger Global Management. Tiger was one of the largest institutional investors in Flipkart before its sale to Walmart. A seasoned corporate executive, Krishnamurthy has had prior stints at eBay and Procter & Gamble. He holds an MBA degree from the Asian Institute of Management, the Philippines, and another MBA in Finance from UIUC College of Business, Illinois (US).

Co-founder & CEO – Zomato

In 2008, Deepinder Goyal co-founded a restaurant discovery platform called Foodiebay with his IIT-Delhi batchmate Pankaj Chaddah. Two years later, it was rebranded as Zomato. Goyal has served as Chief Executive Officer since its inception. In the past 13 years, he has spearheaded the company’s evolution from a restaurant discovery platform to a full-scale food delivery company with a presence in over 500 cities. On this journey, Goyal has led Zomato through many changes topping it with Zomato’s blockbuster Initial Public Offering in 2021. Goyal worked as a management consultant at Bain and Company for three years prior to starting Zomato. He received an Integrated M.Tech in Mathematics and Computing from IIT Delhi in 2005.

Co-founder & CEO – FirstCry

Supam Maheshwari is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at FirstCry. He has a postgraduate degree from IIM Ahmedabad. Maheshwari started a company called Brainvisa along with co-founder Amitava Saha before it was sold. For him, the motivation to start a baby care company was rooted in his personal experiences. As a first-time parent (at the time), he faced a multitude of issues finding the right products for his baby. This led him to start FirstCry in August 2010. The company is present both in online and offline channels. FirstCry also has a physical presence in tier-2 cities such as Dehradun, Bhilai, Haridwar, Bharuch, and Kanpur. Maheshwari was the first to initiate online stores in 2012, a trend that has become a basic need for every retailer today. Eventually, he established his logistics business to fulfill orders, Xpressbees. The company is now run by Amitava Saha and it also started taking third-party orders in 2015.

Xpressbees raised ₹85 crore after being spun off from FirstCry. Xpressbees has reached a valuation of $1.2 billion in a new funding round in February 2022. It has become a Unicorn Startup.

Chairperson – HCLTech

Roshni Nadar Malhotra, an Indian billionaire, industrialist, and philanthropist, is the chairperson of $33-billion HCL Technologies. She is the first woman to lead a listed IT company in India. In 2020, she was ranked 55th on the Forbes World’s 100 Most Powerful Women. She is also a trustee of the Shiv Nadar Foundation, which runs the not-for-profit Sri Sivasubramaniya Nadar College of Engineering in Chennai. She had also been involved in brand building across the HCL Group. Nadar is the chairperson of VidyaGyan Leadership Academy, a leadership academy for the economically underprivileged. She has set up ‘The Habitats’ trust that aims to protect India’s natural habitats and indigenous species to create and conserve sustainable ecosystems.

Vice Chairman – Times Internet

Satyan Gajwani is the vice-chairman of Times Internet, the digital arm of Times Group that reaches over 450 million online users a month through its internet companies like Gaana, MX Player, Cricbuzz, and MagicBricks, among others. Gajwani grew up in Miami in the US and did his graduation in mathematical and computational science and his master’s in management science and engineering from Stanford University. He then worked as a consumer equities trader at Lehman Brothers for a year between 2007-08 before the global recession hit the world economy. In late 2008, Gajwani moved to India and joined The Times Group, where he worked for over a year and a half across print, radio, and television departments, eventually joining its digital new media entity, now called Times Internet.

Partner – Accel

Shekhar Kirani is a Partner at Accel. He has over 25 years of experience in business and tech leadership roles across several startups and large companies in the US.
As part of Accel, Shekhar focuses on investing in early-stage software and mobile startups that help enterprises. He led investments in ANSR, BrowserStack, CareStack, ChargeBee, Cogoport, FalconX, Freshworks, Zenoti, and several companies at their seed stage. Shekhar holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota and a master’s degree from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

Co-founder – Tribe Capital

Arjun Sethi is an American internet entrepreneur, investor and executive. He is the Co-founder and Partner at venture capital firm Tribe Capital. He was a partner at Social Capital and served as an executive at Yahoo!, where he launched Yahoo! Livetext. Before that, he has been a co-founder and CEO of MessageMe (acquired by Yahoo!). In 2008, Sethi took the role of CEO at Lolapps, which developed social games on the Facebook platform. Lolapps developed Ravenwood Fair, which had 10 million monthly active users.
At Tribe, Sethi made its first investment in the cryptocurrency trading platform SFOX. He also continued his investments in Carta, Relativity Space, and Cover. Other Tribe investments include Kraken, Applied Intuition, EquipmentShare, Pipe Technologies, Docker, Republic, Instabase, and Momentus. Sethi also serves on the board of directors of Kraken and Docker. In March 2021, Tribe and Arrow Capital co-sponsored a SPAC raising $240 million, led by Sethi as CEO.

Co-founder & CEO – Razorpay

Harshil Mathur is an Indian entrepreneur, businessman, and author. He co-founded Indian fintech giant Razorpay in May 2014 with Shashank Kumar and serves as its Chief Executive Officer. Mathur has earlier served as a wireline field engineer at the American energy tech company Schlumberger. He studied Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.) from IIT Roorkee and was a member of the famed startup accelerator YCombinator in 2015, where he was apprenticed by Paul Buchheit and Dalton Caldwell.

Razorpay provides payment solutions for small and mid-sized businesses. With its product suite, Razorpay helps to accept and disburse payments. Razorpay’s user-friendly system for attempting to make and transfer funds contributes to the company’s success. Airtel, IRCTC, and Swiggy are among the many companies that use Razorpay’s products.