Building a community of entrepreneurs, investors & partners in sectors of Pidilite Presence!

Arindam Paul is part of the founding team and the chief business officer of Atomberg Technologies, one of the largest digital first consumer brands in India. Been part of Atomberg from the pre revenue stage, he has been instrumental in growing the company from 0 to 1000 cr ARR in less than a decade. His expertise lies in various aspects of omnichannel distribution and brand building . He holds a BTech from NIT Surat and a MBA from IIM Indore. Arindam actively gives back to the startup ecosystem by openly sharing all frameworks and first hand insights from the Atomberg 0-1000 cr journey. He also mentors, advises and invests in founders building consumer brands across all sectors.

Anand Lunia, driven by his aspiration to “make India great again,” is an ardent supporter of startups and entrepreneurs. His journey includes a significant personal investment in Rebel Foods, now a global cloud kitchen leader, reflecting his deep faith in entrepreneurial ventures. Previously a partner at Seedfund, he contributed to successful exits from Carwale and Redbus. Anand also co-founded an edtech company, which he exited in 2005. His belief, as stated in his Twitter bio, “Entrepreneur is the king. Not the VC,” highlights his conviction in the power of entrepreneurship. He champions the notion that living a simple, Indian middle-class life equips an investor with unique insights and strengths.

Bhavna Suresh is the Founder & CEO of 10Clubhomes.com, a one-of-a-kind start-up set to disrupt the $30B Home and kitchen D2C industry. With 10Clubhomes, Bhavna wants to enable new-age Indians with home products that represent their dynamic personalities. Leading an INR 100 crore brand, Bhavna wants to build 10Clubhomes as the single most trusted consumer brand for everything home. Bhavna is an entrepreneur who has constantly broken stereotypes and displayed great prowess at building grounds up. Before this, she built and exited Lamudi Philippines to EMPG Group in 2020. Her first attempt at entrepreneurship was back in 2013 with Stylebank which she built for two years while at business school at HEC, Paris. She wears this first venture failure as her badge of honour too. She is an inclusivity advocate and makes special efforts to practice it while hiring teams and working with stakeholders.

Ramakant Sharma is Co-founder and COO at Livspace, India and SEA’s largest Home interiors and renovation platform. He is a prolific angel investor and mentor for many technology startups.

At Pidilite, Salil has been instrumental in building the Rural and Small town business, which is a growth engine for Pidilite. Besides the Emerging India Business, he has managed flagship Fevicol Division, the Digital centre of excellence, and the Sales Management Centre of Excellence. He is now managing the growth businesses of Dr Fixit, Roff and Haisha Paints. Salil is an alumnus of IIT BHU(94) and NMIMS (97). He has had an illustrious career spanning 28 years across Pidilite, Asian Paints, Nokia – Payment Services, Home Town (Future Group) and Godrej GE. Salil has consistently worked in Startups, and areas New to Business or New to Industry, and enjoys scaling up businesses through process design, team building and consumer insights.

Sanket Parekh began working in Pidilite Ltd at the age of 18, while still pursuing his formal education in Mumbai. Over the last two decades, he’s worked in sales, marketing, operations, supply chain, corporate strategy and M&A roles in India & USA. He has first-hand experience in watching an organization grow from

Tanuj Choudhry is Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of HomeLane, India’s leading interiors platform that houses HomeLane.com, Doowup and Cubico. He has a degree in Mathematics from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi and an MBA from INSEAD. Tanuj has been an entrepreneur for most of his professional life. Before HomeLane, he co-founded SkillKindle, an online marketplace for skills sharing. He started his career at McKinsey & Company, where he spent 6 years in their India and South Africa offices. He also worked at Amazon between his two ventures. Outside of work, Tanuj mentors start-ups, loves to explore new food & culture with his wife & two kids, and is a badminton enthusiast.

Yagnesh Sanghrajka is a Chartered Accountant & prolific VC (Venture Capitalist), mentor and TEDx Speaker. He is the Founder and CFO at 100X.VC, India’s first SEBI registered venture capital fund which uses iSAFE notes to fund startups. 100X.VC has funded 150+ companies till date since inception. These portfolio cos. have raised $77 mn. post 100X infusion. Yagnesh is part of the Investment Committee and also leads the portfolio management and Corporate Venture Capital practice for 100X.VC. Yagnesh has had a long and successful 30+ years career in the corporate world, having led finance, fundraising, M&A, strategy, and Investor Relations for various organizations, large and medium-sized, listed and unlisted. Some of the organizations Yagnesh has worked for in the past, include Hinduja Group (their IT/ITES biz, now known as Hinduja Global Solutions-HGS), Entertainment World Developers P Ltd, part of the Atul Ruia led Phoenix Mills Group, and MT Educare (brand name – Mahesh Tutorials), a listed education services player, now part of Essel Group. He has also worked with a Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), a top-ranked US-based Global VC/PE firm. Yagnesh’s professional perspicacity of the corporate biome is reflected in the novel model of 100X.VC for nurturing seed-stage startups in India. His meticulous mentorship that contains layers of empathy for startup owners has made 100X.VC an ocean of opportunities for startups. He orchestrated the iSAFE for 100X as a unique investing tool, which now has become popular amongst early-stage investors.

A. K. Goel, with over 30 years of cross-functional experience, has been the Former Managing Director of Hettich India Pvt. Ltd., growing the company across the country in the furniture fittings sector. Currently, his leadership extends across various industries and includes significant roles in shaping the furniture fittings market in India and abroad. Additionally, he also contributes to the hardware industry through presentations and papers at international universities.

Srikanth Iyer is the co-founder and CEO of HomeLane.com, ‘India’s tech-enabled home interiors brand’. HomeLane was started in 2014 and was inspired by Srikanth’s personal experience in dealing with the unorganized sector for home designing and décor. With over 30 years of experience as an entrepreneur and a passion for new business ideas, Mr. Iyer has started multiple ventures. He is also a Venture Partner with Unitus Ventures where he leads USF’s national efforts to invest in the best education companies, catering to the requirements of low-income groups. Prior to starting Homelane, Srikanth was the CEO of Pearson India where he was part of the core leadership team, spearheading the mandate to grow the business in the K-12 domain across the country. He ran B2B, B2C and B2G businesses in education and was a pioneer in the managed services model in private schooling in India. His vast expertise in leading successful education technology companies has enabled him to mentor many startups in the fraternity. Srikanth was also the co-founder of Edurite Technologies (2000), a leading e-content provider in the education space which he grew to a value of $100 million. Srikanth’s incandescent leadership bears testimony to the phenomenal growth story of Edurite, which he led to acquisition by Pearson in one of the largest acquisitions in the Indian education space worth $200 million. He began his career at Wipro, from where he moved on to follow his entrepreneurial acumen. Srikanth holds a Post Graduate Diploma in Software Engineering from Harvard University (DCE) and an Undergraduate degree in Computer Science Engineering from Bangalore University, India. He was a state-level table tennis player for four years and is an avid sports fan who dabbles in squash, tennis and cricket.

Ankit Kedia is an award-winning Indian Entrepreneur, best-known as the former Promoter Director at Manjushree Technopack Limited, India’s largest rigid plastic manufacturing organization with revenues of ~$500 million. Along with other members of the family, Ankit helped Manjushree reach a leadership position in the plastic packaging industry and has helped build relationships with blue chip clients including Reckitt Benckiser, Philips, Nivea, Unilever, Coca-Cola, and otherhome-grown clients across the country. In 2018, Manjushree divested controlling stakes to a global PE Major, Advent International, at a record valuation in the packaging industry. Having grown up in an enterprising family of entrepreneurs, Ankit graduated from Western Michigan University with a business degree in Food marketing and then went on to complete his post graduation from the prestigious SP Jain Institute of Management and Research, Mumbai. After having built a large portfolio of angel investments into early-stage startups, he founded Capital-A in 2021, an INR200cr (~$25 Million) early-stage venture capital fund to invest in meaningful startups and entrepreneurs. The fund has a strong thesis into investing in Climatech, EV, Mobility, Fintech, gaming, and other tech-enabled businesses. Ankit has also moved into the role of Founder and Managing Director for Manjushree Packtek Ltd. – a company that acquired a manufacturing firm into sustainable disposable paper cups and containers for food packaging. The company is a formidable player in the industry for the last 20 years and championing the cause of eco-friendly paper packaging. He is also an avid musician and plays the guitar and loves to spend time with his family in his leisure time.

Parag Dhol is a General Partner at Athera Venture Partners (Inventus India, earlier), a venture firm that invests in entrepreneurs building tech-first companies in India. At Athera, Parag is/was a Board Director/Observer at redBus (acquired), FundsIndia, Lemnisk (buy-back), eTechies (buy-back), Power2SME, PolicyBazaar (IPO), Avaz (buy-back), peel-works, Tricog, worxogo, Pixxel and Clootrack. He is based out of Bangalore. Parag made a foray into venture capital after his MBA in 1993. He started off with ICICI Venture (in Bangalore) and followed that up with stints at GE Equity (in Gurgaon) and Intel Capital (in Bangalore). Parag also worked, for two years, with Genpact in a commercial role. Parag has a B. Tech. (Mech. Engg.) from IIT, Delhi and is an MBA from IIM, Bangalore.

Sachin is the Managing Partner at JSW Ventures, an early stage tech focussed VC fund. Before joining JSW Ventures, he was leading Capital18, media & venture investment division of Network18 group. He had also set up the early stage the investment model of Brand Capital, Times Group and has been investing in start- ups since 2014. Prior to the investing domain, Sachin has driven P&Ls of large businesses in consumer, retail and media sectors with large corporates including Reliance Retail, Times Group, The Friedman Group US and have made significant contributions from the start-up phase to scaling up. He was the Co-Founder & Board Director of GetVantage, India’s first revenue- based financing platform for ecommerce businesses and has exited it’s stake. He serves on the boards of both listed and unlisted tech start-ups which includes Homesfy, Zvolv, CureSkin, HealthPlix and Growcoms.

Jayesh Rajpurohit is a co-founder and CEO at Brick&Bolt. He is a B.Tech Civil from IIT Roorkee and worked with tech companies designing and creating scalable applications, before starting Brick&Bolt in 2018. Brick&Bolt is an amalgamation of his educational and professional experience. Brick&Bolt is fixing a super broken and massive market of custom home/building construction and making it simple and transparent. Their technology (suite of 16+ apps with workflow automation and BIM), processes and execution capabilities is scaling construction with predictability. They are operational in Bangalore, Mysore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune and NCR. They have been funded by Sequoia, Accel, Celesta, Foundamental, Stride Ventures and HDFC Capital.

Vikshut Mundkur, Co-founder & CEO of CONSTRA, leverages over 15 years of experience in B2B SaaS, renewable energy, and IT industries to enhance construction productivity with visual intelligence. An alumnus of Sri Jayachamrajendra College of Engineering, he specializes in product management, strategy, and engineering, contributing significantly to the growth and innovation in his field.