There may be an unmistakable pattern that has emerged amongst India’s most seasoned tech leaders. Most of it began due to the attract of constructing an AI startup, transitioning them from main roles in multibillion-dollar corporations and even in profitable startups, to diving into new AI ventures.
The latest phenomenon consists of a number of executives leaving India’s first AI unicorn, Krutrim, to begin and construct one thing new. For instance, Vipul Shah, the VP of merchandise at Krutrim, has began engaged on his stealth AI startup within the structure, engineering, and development (AEC) trade. In keeping with his LinkedIn, his startup is specializing in generative AI, augmented actuality/digital actuality (AR/VR), edge gadgets, and agentic AI options.
Different executives who’ve left Bhavish Aggarwal-led Krutrim are Gautam Bhargava, VP, head of engineering; Samrat Saha, director of machine studying; Achal Kumar Mall, director of product administration; Mikhil Raj, senior director of product administration, and Ashok Jagannathan, vice chairman. These exits had been first reported by The Financial Instances.
Though there aren’t any confirmed updates about most of them constructing an AI startup as most haven’t up to date their LinkedIn profiles after Krutrim, Jagannathan is definitely constructing Agrani Labs as its co-founder and chief architect together with Dheemanth Nagaraj, Sri Nimmagadda, and Rajesh Vivekanandham, all of whom have prior expertise of working at AMD India.
Agrani Labs, which continues to be in stealth mode, goals to construct an AI semiconductor startup.
Aside from these latest exits, Ravi Jain, former enterprise head and VP at Krutrim, left final 12 months to begin TDK Ventures to spend money on deep-tech startups involved in computing, power, robotics, and new mobility.
In the meantime, Utkarsh Garg, who was the affiliate director of product at Krutrim, left to hitch Google and Vishal Mahuli, know-how lead at Krutrim, finally left to hitch the Tarento Group.
Why main workers left Krutrim, although, continues to be a query.
Flipkart Mafia
Notably, Krutrim has seen one of the crucial variety of exits.
Even Binny Bansal, famend for his function in Flipkart’s development because the co-founder, has turned his focus to an AI-as-a-service enterprise geared toward international markets. Earlier this week, he launched Opptra, a brand new enterprise to assist client manufacturers increase into Asia.
The corporate is constructing a portfolio of franchising companies with experience in native markets, supported by centrally developed applied sciences and a worldwide provide chain infrastructure.
Opptra additionally goals to develop superior know-how to assist its franchise companies, integrating robotics, automation, and good logistics into a worldwide provide chain. Bansal’s expertise in scaling Flipkart is informing the event of this infrastructure.
Notably, the corporate has recruited a number of trade leaders to guide its operations.
Ranjit Babu, former government at Nokia, Apple, and Amazon India, is now the CEO of electronics and normal merchandise at Opptra. Giridhar Yasa, former CTO at Lendingkart and principal architect at Flipkart, is now the chief product and know-how officer at Opptra. Anand Raj, who has labored at Flipkart and Swiggy, will head the worldwide provide chain at Opptra.
Apart from, Sandeep Kohli, who beforehand served as a senior vice chairman at Flipkart, and Sudhir Reddy, previously a senior principal architect on the e-commerce large, have co-founded Divyam.AI.
In a LinkedIn publish final 12 months, Kohli mentioned after the “wonderful profession at Flipkart” it was necessary to proceed constructing one thing nice.
Divyam.AI is an autonomous SaaS platform for AI workloads based mostly in Bengaluru.
Equally, Sumeet Ghosh and Jain Johny, who had been beforehand part of the senior tech management staff of Flipkart, have launched Asama.AI specializing in predictive analytics and stopping advert hoc outages for IT infrastructure.
A significant shift from Flipkart was Amod Malviya, a former CTO at Flipkart and co-founder of Udaan. In November final 12 months, he additionally co-founded Pre6, an AI startup nonetheless in stealth mode, probably specializing in AI brokers and automation.
A Lot Extra AI Startups
Talking of Udaan, Mohit Kumar, head of information science and information platform and product analytics at Udaan, left the agency in March 2023 to work at Jupiter, earlier than happening to begin vishwai.ai in April 2024. Right here, he constructed a set of AI powered merchandise which incorporates doc processing and different instruments and apps.
In the meantime, Ankur Jain, who as soon as served because the chief product officer at BharatPe, is venturing into the healthcare area with Jivi AI—a platform designed to behave as a digital well being assistant, integrating AI to reinforce affected person care. Jain, CEO of the platform, whereas talking with AIM earlier, defined how the agency plans to construct an AI physician for 8 billion folks worldwide.
In parallel, Ajit Narayanan, former CTO of Myntra, transitioned from driving cell engagement to becoming a member of MFine, a healthcare startup that makes use of AI for improved medical outcomes, as a founding member and CPTO. At present, Narayanan is the CPTO at Licious after leaving MFine in October 2022.
Tech leaders have been making the transition to constructing startups for fairly a while now, nevertheless it looks as if the appropriate time to lastly take an opportunity and leap into constructing one.
For instance, final 12 months, Gaurav Aggarwal, a former Google Analysis worker who was constructing an AI startup referred to as Ananas Labs in India, needed to cease his enterprise as he couldn’t increase funds. That is when he referred to as the way forward for AI in India extraordinarily bleak. Aggarwal mentioned that this can be very tough to boost capital in India for a deep-tech analysis startup. Now, he’s the VP and chief AI scientist at Reliance Jio.
Nevertheless, issues are actually altering. Take, CP Gurnani, former CEO of Tech Mahindra, as an example. After finishing 19 years on the agency and constructing India’s first LLM, he joined forces with Rahul Bhatia, a outstanding determine from the airline trade, to create AIonOS.
Their enterprise, which affords AI-as-a-service and information engineering options, exemplifies how trade veterans are repurposing a long time of management expertise to deal with rising market wants.
One other government from Tech Mahindra consists of its former enterprise head Jagdish Mitra, who introduced the launch of Humanize, a generative AI IP-powered SaaS startup, simply 4 months after leaving the IT providers firm.
Introduced in August 2024, the brand new enterprise, which mixes generative AI with low code/no code capabilities, goals to scale back the time it takes for purchasers to develop and produce options to market.
Mitra, now the founder and CEO of Humanize, defined, “One of many large issues companies have is that they don’t appear to have all the information structured and organised in a way the place they will benefit from AI. In order that’s our first job at Humanize. We’re creating our personal GenAI toolkit, which is able to assist deploy the identical SaaS platform at a 15-25% quicker tempo.”
Equally, Sharad Sanghi, as soon as on the helm of operations at NTT India and the founding father of Netmagic, has co-founded Neysa—an AI cloud startup that’s attracting curiosity from international traders. The Mumbai-based AI acceleration cloud system supplier, bagged $20 million in seed funding in April 2024. Minimize to October, the staff raised Sequence-A of $30 million, led by NTTVC, Z47, and Nexus Enterprise Companions.
The wave of reinvention continues with Rajiv Srivastava, former MD of HP India. Along with Rajesh Janey from Dell Applied sciences and Rajnish Gupta from Zebra Applied sciences, he launched CoreOps.ai, an organization devoted to delivering bespoke AI options for enterprises.
One other fascinating stealth startup is being constructed by Vivek Sadamate, former SVP at MPL, together with Krishna Mohan Vedula, former VP of merchandise at MPL. Vedula additionally co-founded Striker Membership after MPL’s exit in July 2024, to later begin the stealth AI startup in October that 12 months.
These are just some of the leaders who based corporations. The variety of AI startups which have began within the final 12 months is notably excessive.
The publish Indian Tech Veterans are Abandoning Corporates for AI Startups appeared first on Analytics India Journal.
