India Singapore / ASEAN Entrepreneurship Bridge 2018 is the inaugural edition of the conclave aimed to strengthen Singapore-India economic relations by fostering entrepreneurial engagement. The conclave is being organized by the High Commission of India in Singapore to promote India-Singapore collaboration, connecting entrepreneurs with investors, corporates and innovators.
This year being the commemorative 25th year of ASEAN-Indian relationship, it’s an opportune moment to commence a new chapter in India – Singapore relations by creating a bridge between the equally vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem in both countries and facilitate information flow, opportunity exchange and investments between Indian and Singaporean startups and SME’s. It is envisioned as a go-to platform to support the Indian and Singaporean startups in their efforts to understand and access each other’s ecosystem for mutual growth.
If you are a Startup/SME looking for investors, partners, customers, mentors, regional expansion, InSpreneur offers a unique opportunity!
Get connected, Seek funding, gain knowledge from our stellar lineup of speakers and targeted speed dating and networking sessions.
If you are looking for some inspiration and understanding of the synergies between India and Singapore startup ecosystem, join us for two days of keynote addresses, panel sessions and more.
Participation to the event is by invitation only.
Abhik Roychoudhury is a Professor of Computer Science at National University of Singapore. His research focuses on software testing and analysis, trust-worthy software construction and software security. He has been an ACM Distinguished Speaker (2013-19). He is currently leading the TSUNAMi center, a large five-year long targeted research effort funded by National Research Foundation in the domain of trust-worthy software. He is also the Lead Principal Investigator of the Singapore Cyber-security Consortium. His research has been funded by various agencies and companies, including the National Research Foundation (NRF), Ministry of Education (MoE), A*STAR, Defense Research and Technology Office (DRTech), DSO National Laboratories, Microsoft and IBM. He has authored a book on "Embedded Systems and Software Validation" published by Elsevier (Morgan Kaufmann) Systems-on-Silicon series in 2009, which has also been officially translated to Chinese by Tsinghua University Press. He has served in various capacities in the program committees and organizing committees of various conferences on software engineering, specifically serving as Program Chair of ACM International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA) 2016 and General Chair of ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE) 2022. He has served as an Editorial Board member of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE) from 2014-18. Abhik received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 2000.
Atul Kapur is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Everstone Group, an India and South East Asia focused Private Equity and Real Estate investor. Headquartered in Singapore, Everstone has more than 250 employees across six offices (Singapore, Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Mauritius and London) and manages assets of approximately USD 4 billion.
The Everstone Group has invested in, owns and/or operates over 30 companies across industries including businesses such as IndoStar, Modern Foods, Burger King (India and Indonesia), Ritu Kumar, Hinduja Leyland Finance and several others. Everstone has also made significant investments in IT and IT Enabled Service Businesses, Manufacturing, Education, Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals.
The Group is also one of India’s largest real estate developers as well as the largest owner, developer and manager of industrial warehousing and logistics parks with over 20 million square feet of logistic developments across India under the IndoSpace brand.
Prior to co-founding Everstone Capital in 2006, Atul spent 12 years at Goldman Sachs where he was a Managing Director in the Principal Strategies Group (Goldman Sachs’ proprietary capital) in London. Prior to this, Atul worked in the Principal Investment Area group of Goldman Sachs in both Asia and Europe, deploying the Goldman Sachs Capital Partner family of funds.
Atul has a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Delhi and is a qualified Chartered Accountant.
Chia Tek Yew is Head of KPMG Singapore’s Financial Services Advisory Practice where he leads engagements with clients on areas such as digital transformation and customer growth strategies.
Tek Yew started his early career with KPMG Singapore and left the Firm in 1993 to take on a Management Consulting role with Coopers & Lybrand Hong Kong before returning to Singapore as Managing Partner of PwC Consulting Singapore. During this period, he was also the Managing Partner of PwC Consulting’s Financial Services Practice across Greater China and South East Asia and co-head of their Strategy practice.
Tek Yew’s professional qualifications include B.Acc(Hons) from National University of Singapore; International Management Development Program from INSEAD and Hewlett Packard/Stanford University Executive Development Program.
Floyd DCosta is the co-founder of Block Armour, a cybersecurity venture that leverages Blockchain technology to secure cloud and critical infrastructure. With a background in Management Consulting, Floyd has over 16 years of international professional experience in setting up and growing international business practices as well as advising senior clients executives on decisive topics. His experience includes eleven years at Capgemini and spans a variety of industry sectors and technology platforms. Based out of Singapore, Floyd helps enterprises harness the potential of Cloud and Blockchain technology for competitive advantage.
Block Armour is a next-gen enterprise Cybersecurity solution that leverages Blockchain Technology to secure critical enterprise systems and IoT communication. The solution uses digital signature based identity and authentication for humans, devices and data. Leveraging private permissioned blockchain and TLS technology, Block Armour delivers a Blockchain Defined Perimeter (BDP) - an enhanced Software-Defined Perimeter - rendering critical systems / cloud servers invisible; thereby making it near impossible for hackers to discover and attack, while providing a secure communication channel for legitimate users. The platform also harnesses blockchain based digital signatures to identify, authenticate and authorize devices to secure IoT communications.
Howard leads and manages the overall operation of the Innovation Centre. He brings experience from the academic, industry and financial sectors focused on developing businesses around emerging technology. He has founded, held executive management positions, acted as Member of the Board of Directors and CEO of multiple companies in the United States and Asia. He was Consulting Director of Bio*One Capital Pte Ltd and acted as the interim CEO of several of their portfolio companies.
Howard was the CEO of Johns Hopkins Singapore and The Johns Hopkins-NUH International Medical Centre. At Johns Hopkins Singapore, he led and managed a team of 80 researchers, physicians, administrators and staff, to establish a Center of Excellence in research, education and patient care. From 1995 to 1999, Howard was Assistant Dean of The Johns Hopkins University, School of Medicine, where he was responsible for its business development activities, including the Office of Technology Licensing which is tasked to commercialise all medical discoveries originating at Hopkins.
He holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University and a Juris Doctorate from University of Maryland.
Jagdish Mahapatra is the Chief of Channels and Alliances for McAfee, Asia Pacific Theatre, which includes ANZ, South East Asia, North Asia and India. His key responsibilities include Building a Strong Partner ecosystem for Asia Pacific theatre with the focus on creating strategic Alliances and new routes to market like Cloud and Managed Services.
Prior to that he was the Managing Director of McAfee India & SAARC for 5 years. In his tenure, he built a high-performance team to propel McAfee as the No. 1 Security player in the market for last 3 years with strong presence in Govt, Banks, Enterprises and Consumers. He built a strong engagement culture in the India team which placed McAfee India in the Top 50 Great Places to Work in India in 2015.
He was recognized as one of the Top 40 Executives in India Inc under 40 in 2011 by Business World.
He recently delivered a TED talk for “TED Talk Nayi Soch” for TED and Star TV being aired on Television from Dec 2017.
In his career spanning 20 plus years, he spent 12 years with Cisco in multiple roles from building the Distribution Channel, Commercial Business to managing the largest Sales Vertical, IT Services in his last assignment at Cisco with a business of 200M USD.
In the formative part of his career, he was instrumental in creating the manufacturing off shoring model in India which emerged as a significant game changing industry phenomenon during his stint at Larsen and Toubro, a large Engineering Conglomerate in India.
On the academic front, Jagdish is an Electrical Engineer with MBA in Marketing and Finance. Jagdish loves to explore travel to experience cultures, food and local mythology and loves to relate the stories to work. Born in the holy city of Puri, one of the 4 top pilgrimages of India, he finds Indian mythology inspiring to fulfil todays’ life. He is an avid reader from fiction to Business and Technology and loves to blog regularly on all topics on Social media. Right now, his passion is to rekindle his music desires with Piano and Drums.
Krishnan focuses on bringing a an industry transformation perspective to IBMs Cyber Security capabilities - looking at the theater of activity through the Digital transformation lens. Krishnan has been advising Governments in Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore and South Asia on formulating their Cyber Defense strategies to uphold National Sovereignty. His experience with sectoral security specifics allow him to propose complete and viable solutions.
Through 2015-16 and continuing into 2017, the banking sector WW and especially in India has been alive to cyber channel threats exploiting the mobile banking channel as a pathway. IBM has responded putting together a Detect looking-ahead & Respond capability through capability expansion on its Qradar, the IBM counter-fraud platform, Trusteer & recently integrating Resilient, the category leading Incident Response Platform into this continuum - while opening up its industry leading threat intel & research X-force platform. Krishnan has been working with the private bank majors in India to build out their capabilities safeguarding online banking and developing greater visibility by retrofitting bank Security Operations Centers, SoCs with IBM Security Intelligence. Krishnan has been engaged with the central banks of South Asia around setting up SoCs with the readiness to respond proactively to threats.
Krishnan had been the Public Sector Lead on the Advanced Analytics Tiger team at IBM.
Prior to joining IBM, Krishnan had been a security practitioner through the early years of the internet helping secure online B2B transactions and landing Liberty Federated Identity with Sun Microsystems in Asia-Pacific. As Regional Security Architect at Hewlett Packard Security Services, he built security frameworks for Global Banking majors and supported the transformation of security exchanges in South East Asia.
Krishnan had been driving the Cloud business for Microsoft Communications Sector partnering with CSPs & their Alliance partners in Asia. He has worked with CSP clients on transformational VAS initiatives.
As a result Krishnan is very familiar with the opportunity and challenges Cloud presents and is well positioned to relate to the IBM portfolio for the Cloud with the newly released Cloud capability.
Nipun Mehrotra is IBM’s Chief Digital Officer (CDO) & Vice President, Digital Business Group (DBG) for India/South Asia. This newly created position drives Digital transformation – externally with the Tech EcoSystem and Enterprises; and internally creating a “Digital by Design” platform within IBM.
He is passionate about encouraging the wider adoption of “Design Thinking” combined with the power of AI, Block-chain, IOT, Data Sciences etc. to build Client-centric and “future-ready” businesses by “Co-creating” with the Tech Eco-System (Start Ups, Academia, Developers & VCs).
Helps Enterprise CXO’s with “Digital Transformation” by driving Business model innovation, Tech strategy and Leadership enablement, including setting up and leading enterprise level innovation councils. Engages actively with Start-ups, industry associations like Nasscom, TiE, CII along with several Govts. Serves on the Board of Advisors for several and mentors 25+ young Start-ups; 100+ professionals - especially women to leadership roles and is an active panelist, speaker, certified coach. In 2016, co-authored an extensive consulting study on “Ecosystem India – Making India essential in the Eco System economy.” on behalf of IBM Institute of Business Value.
Nipun recently relocated from Singapore to Bangalore and through his 30+ year career in the Tech industry – based out of Delhi, Bangalore, Shanghai and Singapore has led several strategic shifts while leading large operational businesses (Hardware, Technology Services, Enterprise Sales in Asia Pacific, etc.). His expertise lies in successfully straddling innovation with operational execution. In recent years, he led IBM's strategy & transformation across Asia Pacific including strengthening Global strategic partnerships.
In 2017 his was one of the first few CDO positions appointed in an IBM market geography, reflective of India’s importance in the Tech Eco System. Under his leadership, DBG has rapidly built deep skills in Data Sciences and AI in domains like Fintech, Retail and Distribution and created collaborative business models & partnerships (eg: IBM Garage) to integrate the innovation priorities of Enterprises, Tech Eco System & IBM. DBG “Builds with” Tech Start Ups & ISVs, “Co-creates” with Enterprises & the Tech Eco-System and is now creating several “Co-learn” initiatives with leading Academic institutions.
Padmaja Ruparel is nationally recognized as a key player in the Indian entrepreneurial ecosystem and has helped co found many of the relevant institutions, besides being an active Angel investor herself. Her operating experience spans large corporates, M&A, and startups/early stage companies. She has been awarded as one of the 'Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Business' by Fortune India and “30 Most Powerful Women in India” by Business Today.
She is Co-Founder & President of Indian Angel Network (IAN), India's first and now possibly one of the world’s largest group of business angels, comprising the who's who of successful entrepreneurs and dynamic CEOs from India and overseas. She built IAN from inception, making it within 10 years a unique institution globally, with over 450 investors across 10 countries and a portfolio of 130+ companies in 7 countries, spanning 17 sectors. She has operationalised IAN’s international operations in London – making it the only angel group in the world to set up operations outside of its home country. Padmaja has been nominated as Co Chair of Global Business Angel Network (GBAN).
She also established a unique model of an incubator, in partnership with the Indian Government, which leverages 400 mentors to provide mentoring & domain expertise to around 50 young fledgling incubatee companies.
Padmaja is the Founding Partner of the IAN Fund, a uniquely differentiated Fund which along with IAN, is set to create the largest horizontal platform in India for investing in seed and early stage ventures.
She is a member of the Governing Council of EM3 Services, a nation building venture seeking to create a paradigm shift in the Indian agricultural sector by improving productivity. She helped the company raise funds from an international Venture Capital fund and is actively involved in its strategy and growth. Padmaja is widely recognized for her significant contribution to the Indian entrepreneurial ecosystem. Apart from cofounding IAN, she also set up and operationalised the Delhi chapter of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TIE) the world’s largest organization focused on entrepreneurship with 15,000 members in 60 chapters across 14 countries. TiE Delhi has been ranked as the Number One chapter globally for the last 4 consecutive years. She played a key role as Executive Director in building the Indian Venture Capital Association, India's oldest and largest association of VC and PE firms. In addition she helped the creation of Lankan Angel Network in Sri Lanka. She contributed actively in the Planning Commission’s Committee on “Angel & Early Stage Investing in India” which resulted in a seminal report: “Creating a Vibrant Entrepreneurial Eco system in India”. She is on the Committee of Telecom Centre of Excellence, Selection Committee of MSME and is actively engaged with the various committees of Ministry of Finance, SEBI, etc.
Padmaja picked up entrepreneurial strings very early in her career – she revived and grew the family real estate business in Calcutta – growing if from 50,000 sq ft to over 250,000 sq ft over 2 years and turned it around to become a profitable business.
A graduate with English Honours, Padmaja then completed her MBA as well as Chartered Accountancy (Intermediate) with her internship with S.R. Batliboi (an E&Y group company).
Dr Palvinderjit Singh, a 30-year old Malaysian-born doctor is the Chairman of the ASEAN Sikh Economic & Entrepreneurship Summit (2017 - 2020) - Modeled after the World Economic Forum, this annual summit strives to gather under one roof the most successful and prominent Sikhs from around the world to address economic and business issues that affect the Sikh population. The 1st summit was held on 8 and 9 July 2017 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and attended by 500 delegates from 5 ASEAN countries. Coinciding with the 25th year of ASEAN India Dialogue Partnership, this flagship initiative aimed at building a network of influential business leaders, policy makers, and academicians which will help Sikh entrepreneurs to tap into new opportunities.
He is also the Chairman of the ASEAN Sikh Entrepreneurs Organisation (2016 - present)- a newly minted entrepreneurs’ organisation that aims to unite ASEAN Sikhs on an economic & business platform and achieve collective goals together.
Dr. Singh is the Founder of Tune Care, a low cost healthcare arm of Tune Group of Companies. The partners in this venture include Tan Sri Tony Fernandes, GCEO of Air Asia Group. He is also the Team Coordinator of Nanak's Kitchen since 2014, a team that runs a soup kitchen for KL's homeless.
Mr. Mehta is the Head of Information security for PayPal's Asia-Pacific region. A seasoned professional and technical leader with 18 years of experience, he has been instrumental in building secure technology solutions for multiple companies across a spectrum of sectors including financial services, healthcare, telecommunication, and government.
He has lead projects globally through roles in Security Architecture, Strategic Consulting and Risk Assessments.
Mr. Mehta serves on the ISACA Singapore board and has been a speaker at multiple regional conferences like RSA-APAC, CloudSec, etc. He has a Master’s in Computer Science and carries major certifications like CISSP, CISM, CRISC to name a few.
Pravan heads Internet Investments in Asia for the Venture Capital team at the International Finance Corporation, a member of the World Bank Group. IFC has invested over $1 billion in venture capital investments in VC Funds and directly into Internet, HealthTech, EduTech and CleanTech companies. His investments include Lenskart, BigBasket, NephroPlus, Moglix, Azure Power and Portea Medical in India and Jungle Ventures, Jungle SeedPlus, Oway and Reddoorz in Southeast Asia. Prior to joining IFC, Pravan was a Principal with ORIX Venture Finance in New York and started his career in investment banking. Pravan holds an MBA from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and is based in Singapore.
Rahul Narayan is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer for TeamIndus. Rahul has been working alongside two dozen former ISRO scientists and an 85 member strong engineering team to design, develop and build a spacecraft capable of soft landing on the Moon.
Prior to TeamIndus, this IIT Delhi alumnus has been an entrepreneur and has led multiple software product development initiatives.
As Head of Cisco Investments and M&A for Asia Pacific and Japan, Rajiv leads an experienced team of Investment professionals that manage an active portfolio of start-ups in IOT, Customer Experience Management, Location Analytics, V2V/V2X communication, Open Source Middleware, Connected Mobility and Smart City applications amongst several others. Rajiv and his team are also responsible for M&A and Joint Venture partnerships across Asiapacific & Japan as well as managing LP positions in Australia, India, Japan, Korea and Singapore.
Prior to his current role, Rajiv served as the Managing Director for Cisco Capital Asia Pacific, Japan and Greater China. In all, Rajiv has over 22 years of experience in credit structuring, term lending, trade finance, money market trading, venture lending, venture investing and M&A. Prior to joining Cisco, he co-founded Captive Finance Corporation, a technology financing company, and served as the Vice President for Asia.
Originally from New Delhi, he began his corporate finance career with the venerable Tata Group after receiving his Masters in Finance from the University of Delhi. Mr. Menon now resides in Singapore with his family and is an avid Polo player.
Ms Rama Vedashree recently took over as the CEO of Data Security Council of India. She was earlier working as Vice President, NASSCOM leading all initiatives in Domestic IT, eGovernance and Smart Cities among others. At NASSCOM, she has also led the Healthcare initiative in partnership with apex Health Sector body, NATHEALTH. She is also anchoring a new initiative of the Industry on making India a global hub for cyber security.
Raman is currently the Chairman of the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM). He is widely regarded as one of the pioneers of the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry in India. He launched Quatrro to focus on ‘Beyond the existing’ services in the BPM industry. Since 1992 he has played a pivotal role in promoting India as a preferred destination for Remote Processing to mainly North American and European companies. He has successfully led the BPO initiatives of American Express, General Electric and Spectramind (now Wipro BPO) before starting Quatrro in 2005.
He is deeply involved in shaping the future of the Business Process Management Industry in India, China, Mauritius, Sri Lanka and Caribbean Region. BBC Knowledge Magazine in December 2013 chose Raman as one amongst the 10 Game Changers that shaped modern India. Raman, with a guiding philosophy of enhancing the success rate of nascent businesses and encouraging entrepreneurship, is a founding member of the “Indian Angel Network”, a group of investors that has a passion to enable start-up businesses. Raman is a Chartered Accountant and a Chartered Management Accountant with a Doctorate in Management Accountancy.
Sanjay is the Chief Innovation Officer at CIIE, where he leads efforts to help create, promote, and encourage entrepreneurship in areas around digital technology.
Sanjay Jain is also a Fellow at iSPIRT, the software product industry think tank. He has been an active member of the India Stack, Open API, and Cashless teams. He has been working with the NPCI to define the next generation payment systems (the Unified Payment Interface), as well as with regulators and other bodies to help entire processes go paperless. He has been one of the key contributors to help create, and evangelize various government open APIs, which are collectively referred to as the India Stack.
During his career, Sanjay has been responsible for the development of many large scale, high impact systems. He was the Chief Product Manager at the UIDAI, where he led the product development efforts from its early days till well after the launch. The UIDAI has issued over a billion numbers to Indian residents. He was also responsible for the creation and launch of Google Map Maker - a crowd-sourced mapping product that is responsible for Google Maps data for 170+ countries (including India).
Sanjay has been a part of many entrepreneurial teams through his career, including most recently at EkStep, Khosla Labs, and as a founder of Novopay Solutions.
Sanjay holds an M.S. in Computer Science, from the University of California, Los Angeles and a B.Tech in Computer Science & Engineering, from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai.
Tobias Puehse is the Vice President, Mastercard Labs, Asia Pacific.
Mr. Puehse leads innovation management at Mastercard Labs Asia Pacific and our newly founded Mastercard Labs India. In this role, he is responsible for activities that help generate and launch breakthrough, innovative ideas, both internally and in collaboration with our key external partners. Through the first Mastercard Labs dedicated to India, he and his team are shaping the future of digital payments and financial inclusion in this important growth market. His focus spans ideation through business case development & launch, both developing new propositions and determining which opportunities make the most sense for Mastercard and its partners to pursue & incubate. Most recently, Mr. Puehse was named to Next Bank’s Top 100 leaders in Asia’s fintech scene which recognizes people shaping finance across Asia and beyond.
Everyone should build their network before they need it. Grab this opportunity to discover and connect with people coming to India Singapore / ASEAN Entrepreneurship Bridge.