Building AI for the next 6 billion people

Before co-founding Chapter.ai & AI foundry, Umakant co-founded pi Ventures, a $35m early stage fund for AI (India’s first & only AI focused fund), investing in leading AI companies in India (Sigtuple, Niramai, Ten3THealth, Zenatix, Locus.sh and others). He has spent more than 10 years in AI space (Founded India’s first AI bot startup in '09) as an entrepreneur, strategy thinker and investor in enterprise, healthcare and logistics. Ex-Director India for Science Inc., he spent time in strategy and innovation roles at Wipro Ltd, one of the leading IT Services company. IIT Kanpur Alum and an abstract painter in his spare time.

Neeraj was one of the early contributors to Torch, the deep learning framework, back in the days when neural nets used to work only on super-compute. He founded FormulateIP based in India and Canada with focus on helping AI businesses using IP protection, licensing and strategic planning. He also co-founded Excubator, one of the leading startup incubators in Bangalore. He is Governing Council Member at IIT Alumni Centre Bengaluru, IITACB. Masters in Mathematics from KTH, Stockholm with a Minor in Machine Learning. Alumnus of IIT Roorkee.

Pulkit is focused on working in common sense AI, one of the next big evolutions in AI. He is Asst. Professor at MIT CSAIL & Co-founder of SafelyYou Inc, which is applying computer vision to prevent falls in elder care homes. His research focuses on curiosity driven machines & common sense problem in Robots. He has a PhD from BAIR (Berkeley AI Research) and Bachelors from IIT Kanpur. He was awarded Director’s Gold Medal for best all round achievement and leadership at IIT Kanpur and is excited by the quest for singularity.

Bal Krishna Birla is a serial entrepreneur in retail and content areas. He was the CTO of Asklaila, one of the first classified sites in India. He also was also the co-founder and CEO of ZopNow, one of the early entrants into the grocery e-commerce space. He also runs an initiative to fight fake news called Check4spam. He has built a large volunteer (5 lakh+) driven community called”Bhoole Bisre Geet”. His core area of expertise is technology, SEO & digital marketing and product. He is alumnus of IIT Kanpur (Comp.Sc.).

Subhashis is an investment banker and has previously worked for Standard Chartered Bank Real Estate Private Equity Fund, Tata Housing Development Company, Sequoia Capital, Tishman Speyer Private Equity Fund. He has worked and lived in most major cities of India and understands the real estate dynamics of those cities well. The list includes Mumbai, Bangalore, NCR, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Kolkata.

Has been deeply involved in deals for both the residential market and office market as an investment banker. An alumnus of IIT Kanpur and IIM Calcutta.

Rohit Rathi shouldered the responsibility of technology and product development for Smartron, one of the most innovative mobile phone companies out of India. He spearheaded advanced R&D, innovation and IP creation in the areas of smart, sensors, robotics, artificial intelligence, cloud and big data technologies. In the past, he has been Founder-Director and CTO of Notion Ink and pioneered the effort to make the country’s first tablet device. Prior to that, he worked with Xilinx-India in 2008-2009. Mr. Rathi is an IIT Kharagpur graduate and likes to think about design deeply.

Ram Ganesan is a CA and CPA of USA and has over 20 years of experience in corporate finance, project funding, venture capital, governance, legal and audit, profit-center management, driving business strategies and more in leading companies in the Indian industry. He has also been an entrepreneur for over 10 years in Health care BPO, Corporate training, and Education. He has previously served as CFO of Opinio, a logistics technology venture, Health Office and Indal Hydro Ltd. He is an adventurous & brutally honest person whose inquisitive mind leads him into deep explorations of the universe. Other interests include cooking, tennis, reading and tourism.