Anil Advani specializes in the representation of early stage startup companies, venture funds, institutional angel investors and many prominent angel investors in silicon valley, India and other startup jurisdictions around the world. In the last 17 years practicing law in Silicon Valley, Mr. Advani has represented more than 2,000 startup companies and numerous founders, venture capital investors, angel investors, investment banks and venture debt investors in silicon valley and across the world, on issues relating to formation, founder issues, consulting and advisory arrangements, capital structuring, angel financings, venture financings, debt financings, leasing, strategic licensing and customer arrangements, and mergers and acquisitions. Mr. Advani has represented clients in more than 300 financing and M&A transactions valued at over $2 billion in the aggregate. He also has an active practice representing: (1) U.S. based public companies, investment banks, financial institutions and venture funds on acquisitions, financings, joint ventures and other strategic transactions in India, and (2) companies from New York, Los Angeles, Arizona, Chicago, India, Singapore, Turkey, Brazil, Mexico, Columbia, Croatia, Iceland, Czech, Hungary, Romania, South Africa, the U.K. and other world jurisdictions in setting up operations in Silicon Valley.

Prior to starting Inventus Law in September 2009, Mr. Advani was Of Counsel and Head of India Practice in the Menlo Park offices of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. Before joining Orrick, he was General Counsel and Vice President of SemIndia, a pioneering effort to establish semiconductor manufacturing in India. In that role, he was responsible for coordinating with the Government of India in formulating a comprehensive semiconductor policy for India as well as with the State of Andhra Pradesh in structuring Fab City in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh. Prior to joining SemIndia, Mr. Advani was a Senior Associate in the Silicon Valley offices of Cooley Godward where his practice focused on representing emerging companies and the venture funds and banks that finance those companies. Mr. Advani started his legal career practicing in the High Court of Delhi, India. He is licensed to practice in California, New York and New Delhi, India.

Mr. Advani is fluent in English, Hindi, Sindhi and Punjabi, and loves Cricket, Golf, Basketball and Cycling.

Digvijay is a professional with close to 20 years of experience in leading companies across sectors. Digvijay has continuously built sales / distribution model from scratch in virgin territory and scaled it to national levels.

Starting with offline product company, Apollo Tyres, he built the company’s distribution organisation in the newly formed state of Uttaranchal which was earlier driven by dealer network. While, he built this business in an entrepreneurial model, it is now well entrenched in the state. Further, he opened up accounts in the government sectors like UPSRTC (Uttar Pradesh State Roadways Transport Corporation) to become a fast tracker with the company.

From tyres to Insurance, Digvijay helped build the Distribution Network of ICICI Lombard GIC Ltd. The network included direct, agency and dealer distribution models. Again, he led from the front & built the team which took this distribution network national.

Digvijay evolved with the digital environment and led the retail network of brokers in the NCR area for Magic Bricks.com. He was quickly awarded the Best Zonal Business Head for Q1 of 2014-15 as conversions continued to increase. He was recognised with the responsibility of a national role to lead a 200 person feet-on-the-street model with a management team of 15. This was a challenging role as it combined both user acquisition, conversion to sales, with sourcing and then providing quality broker data to the team. Within a year, he had built a nationwide model of sourcing primary data as well as curating it for efficient use by the company.

With the startup ecosystem growing in India, Digvijay decided to swivel his career and joined Indian Angel Network (www.indianangelnetwork.com) as Vice President moving himself from a corporate executive to a player in the entrepreneurial world. IAN is India’s first and the world’s largest angel investor group with close to 500 investors from 11 countries, over 125 company portfolio and growing, based in 7 countries across 17 sectors. IAN is the Top Funder in India over a number of years and has been providing continuous returns to its investor base. Digvijay led deal origination nationally as well as while building the South India operations of IAN.

Within a year, Digvijay moved to the helm of IAN as COO (Chief Operating Officer). In addition to building the deal flow engine, he is now responsible for investor / member engagement, shortlisting & curation process, building robust processes and frameworks, portfolio management and brand building.

Digvijay is a Management graduate and a hands-on business builder.

M.R. (Madhavan) Rangaswami is a software executive, investor, entrepreneur, corporate eco-strategy expert, community builder and philanthropist. Recognized as a software business expert, M.R. participated in the rapid expansion of the Silicon Valley software industry during his tenure as an executive at both large and small software companies. In 1997, M.R. co-founded Sand Hill Group, an investment and consulting group which made several notable investments, produced the Enterprise and Software conference series and launched SandHill.com, an online resource for software business strategy. In 2007, M.R. founded the Corporate Eco Forum, an organization dedicated to improving the effectiveness of eco-strategies at Global 500 companies. In 2012 he founded Indiaspora to unite Indian Americans and to transform their success into meaningful impact in India and on the global stage.

Arpit has been involved with promotion of startups and ecosystem since 2006, his first brush with it being at the first BarCamp in Bangalore. He later joined hands with fellow campers to start Headstart Network, today India's leading early stage entrepreneurs' network with over 20 city chapters running for more than 9 years.

He got introduced to the power of taking academic research to market as an MBA student at IIT Bombay which led the start of Academic Ventures, a consulting firm in the incubator management and technology commercialization space. In 2012, Arpit joined TLabs, the accelerator program of Times Internet, as its second employee and discovered the joy of working closely with early stage startups.

He is now with Blume for almost four years as a Principal, responsible for scouting science-led and hardware businesses, apart from managing a portfolio of about 15 companies. These include companies in a variety of sectors ranging from used goods market to IOT to Healthcare to Enterprise services.

Ravi Gururaj is the Founder/CEO of QikPod where he is building a nationwide network of parcel delivery lockers in partnership with top tier investors and strategic industry partners. Ravi is the founder of 6 technology ventures, 2 of which were acquired by public NASDAQ companies, an angel investor, a mentor to numerous entrepreneurs, technology executive, and an ecosystem evangelist.

Over his 26-year career, Ravi has held wide ranging roles including promoting an STPI unit exporting software components out of India, product management at Intel, served as Managing Director of the Trilogy Software's India engineering center, and founded multiple software product ventures.

Ravi is a member of NASSCOM's Executive Council & Product Council, is member of the Executive Committee of the Indian Venture Capital Association (IVCA), is President of TiE Bangalore where he is a Charter Member on the Governing Council, is Co-Chair & Founder of the Penn & Wharton Club of Bangalore, is Co-Chair & Co-Founder of HBS Alumni Angels India, is Chief Mentor at Reliance Industries GenNext Startup Accelerator, is a member of the Govt. of Karnataka Startup Council and is a member of the CII Startup Council.

VMLogix, which Ravi founded in 2004 and funded by Bain Capital Ventures was acquired by Citrix in 2010. At Citrix, Ravi served as Vice President Products in the Cloud Platforms group, was a member of the global Citrix CTO Office, represented the Citrix Startup Accelerator and was on the India R&D leadership team.

Ravi received his MBA with high distinction as a Baker Scholar from Harvard Business School. He graduated with honors as Benjamin Franklin Scholar from the University of Pennsylvania in the Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology, receiving a B.S.E. in Computer Science & Engineering from the Moore School and a B.Sc. in Finance from the Wharton School. He was also a research scholar at the University of Edinburgh and schooled at La Martiniere for Boys in Kolkata.

Sateesh has worked with venture-backed technology start-ups in U.S/India for the past twenty years. Currently, he is Managing Director at Endiya Partners, a Venture Capital fund that offers Startup Capital to Product Startups across Technology, Healthcare and Consumer Services. He serves on the boards of AlphaICs, Kissht, and Darwinbox

As a Managing Partner of Ventureast Tenet Fund, he served on the boards of Little Eye Labs (Facebook), Seclore and OneBreath.

Prior to joining Ventureast, Andra was a Venture Partner and one of the founding members of Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) India, a global venture capital fund investing in category-leading Technology and Cleantech companies in India like Cleartrip, PubMatic, Attero, Reva and mGinger etc.

Prior to DFJ, Sateesh co-founded Euclid, a silicon valley startup, in the IT Management Software space and was instrumental in raising VC funding ($35 M+), acquiring, and managing marquee customers and partners. He has also served in product marketing and engineering leadership roles at Tsqware (Conexant), LSI Logic, and VLSI Technology (Philips).

He is a Charter Member of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE). He is involved with the Pullela Gopichand Badminton Academy with the objective of popularizing sports and promoting fitness consciousness in the corporate world. Sateesh co-founded Health Awareness Promotion Project India (HAPPI), which creates awareness about Non-Communicable Diseases.

Sateesh holds a Bachelor's and Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering.

Specialties: Internet, Mobile, SaaS/Cloud, Education, Healthcare, Cleantech, Financial Services, Social Ventures

Karl Mehta is a serial entrepreneur, investor, engineer, and civil servant with over 20 years of experience in founding, building, and funding technology companies in the U.S. and international markets.

He is currently Founder & CEO of EdCast Inc., a next-generation knowledge platform and former Venture Partner at Menlo Ventures. He is Founder of Silicon Valley based tech-driven non-profit, CodeforIndia.org and serves on several non-profit boards for education impact worldwide.

Previously, he was the Founder & CEO of PlaySpan Inc., acquired in the March of 2011 by Visa Inc. (NYSE:V), the world's largest payment network. PlaySpan is a global leader in payments and monetization for digital media, mobile apps, social networks, and online games.

Karl served as a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow, selected by the Obama Administration during the inaugural 2012-13 term. He was also recently appointed by Governor Brown to the Workforce Investment Board of the State of California.

In 2010, Karl won the "Entrepreneur of the Year" award for Northern California from Ernst & Young. Karl is on the boards of Simpa Networks Inc., and the Chapman University Center for Entrepreneurship and advisor board of Intel Capital.

He has also co-authored the book 'Financial Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid

Mr. Venkatesh Peddi is Executive Director at IDG Ventures India Advisors. He has over 15 years of industry experience, including 9 years of venture experience.

Prior to IDG Ventures, Venkatesh was Deputy Vice President at Reliance Venture Asset Management - the corporate venture capital arm of Reliance ADA Group. He was involved in executing multiple end-to-end investments and was a board member at Gradatim IT Ventures and a board observer at Suvidhaa Infoserve and Pelago Inc. Venkatesh was earlier an Account Manager in Investment Banking division of Adventity, a leading KPO player, where he advised deal teams of leading investment banks at various deal stages. He later moved to Adventity Inc., New York, to take up roles involving close client interaction, while being promoted on a fast track basis from an Analyst to Manager within 10 months. Prior to Adventity, as Assistant Manager at Blue Star Infotech, Venkatesh helped in structuring deals and M&A.

Venkatesh is an active CFA charterholder from the CFA institute, USA and holds a Bachelors degree in engineering from VJTI, Mumbai and a Masters degree in Management Studies from Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies (JBIMS).

Mr. Ganapathy Venugopal (VG)
Co-founder & CEO of Axilor Ventures.

Axilor Ventures (www.axilor.com), an accelerator and seed-fund, was set up to improve the odds of success of early stage Startups through a new venture funding model. It runs the largest accelerator program in India and is one of the most active seed investors. It currently works with Startups in consumer internet, enterprise, deep-tech, healthcare, and fin- tech.

VG spent his first fifteen years in leadership roles in large corporates working with CXOs manage successful businesses. Prior to co-founding Axilor Ventures, VG was Head of Strategy & Planning at Infosys. At Axilor, he works with startup founders build successful businesses.

VG serves on the boards of several companies and advisory bodies. An avid reader and writer, he holds a bachelors in engineering and a post graduate degree in management from IIM Lucknow.