Innovating Sovereign AI for India (Zoom-only)

Speakers

Paula Mariwala

Founding Partner, Aureolis Ventures & Co-President, Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs India

Paula is a physicist by training, but she dons many hats: technologist, businesswoman, investor, mentor and philanthropist. Her previous investments have been in the areas of technology, sustainability, social impact, women empowerment and education. A Stanford alumna, she was actively involved with the entrepreneurial ecosystem in India at a time when entrepreneurship was not considered “cool.”

With an experience of over 25 years, Paula strongly believes in mentoring and working hand-in-hand with the founding teams to create a win-win proposition. She has led investments in several early-stage companies and has a portfolio of more than 35 companies with experience of exits in companies such as Tapchief, Tread, Browntape, Thinklabs, RedBus, Carwale, etc. She is well-versed with the entire VC cycle of sourcing, evaluation, due diligence, closing deals as well as working with portfolio companies over their entire life cycle of scaling, fund raising and managing exits.

Through Aureolis, Paula is continuously seeking to invest in innovative companies that create impact in education, gender equality and entrepreneurship, and use technology for sustainable solutions.

Sharad Sanghi

Founder and CEO, Neysa Networks & Chairman, NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India

Sharad is the Founder and CEO of Neysa, an AI acceleration cloud platform company. With over three decades of extensive experience, he is a pioneer in India’s technological infrastructure, he introduced the country’s first data centers, substantially advancing the nation’s digital landscape.

Under his leadership, Neysa is at the forefront of developing AI cloud infrastructure including High Performance Computig clusters for training and fine tuning of AI workloads and also public cloud infrastructure for enterprise clients.

Mr. Sanghi’s entrepreneurial journey began with founding Netmagic in 1998, which grew to become India’s leading data centre company, eventually acquired by NTT In two tranches in 2012 when they bought out the investors and in 2017. By the time he left NTT to found Neysa, the datacenter business in India grew to 19 datacenters with over 4 million sq ft, 300MW of IT load . These included High density purpose built AI datacenters with Direct to chip liquid cooling and also Liquid Immersion cooling. The clients in India included the top hyperscalers like amazon, google, Microsoft, apple, tencent, Alibaba, and also Top Global enterprises like hdfcbank, icici bank, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Citibank, American Express and Visa to name a few.

In 2022 Mr Sanghi was promoted  lead the Global NTT Datacenter and Submarine cable business with over 2.1 billion in revenue running datacenters across US, Europe, India and Rest of Asia.

He  presently continues as the non-executiv e Chairman of NTT Global Data Centres & Cloud Infrastructure India Pvt. Ltd.

In 2019, Mr. Sanghi was inducted into The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) Mumbai’s ‘Hall of Fame’ as an Outstanding Entrepreneur in the Deep Tech category. He serves as a board member of the APNIC Foundation and co-chairs the Data Centre Council of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), further establishing his leadership in the tech industry.

Earlier in his career, Mr. Sanghi contributed significantly to network management and engineering at prestigious organisations like AT&T Bell Labs, NSFNET (ANS), and IBM Global Network. He was instrumental in designing and deploying Wide Area Networks for Merrill Lynch and Bankers Trust.

Mr. Sanghi earned an Electrical Engineering degree from IIT Bombay and a Master’s degree from Columbia University, New York. He was honoured with IIT Bombay’s Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2021, recognising his exceptional contributions to academia, industry, public service, and social welfare.

Raoul Nanavati

Co-Founder and CEO, Navana.ai