Suku Krishnaraj Chettiar

I recently interviewed Harshit Omar, Co-Founder & CTO of FluidCloud, and asked him three direct questions about what recent cloud outages really mean for enterprises. His answers cut through the noise — on:
• Why “multi-cloud” often isn’t truly resilient
• Where most enterprises are still exposed to risk
• What real cloud portability actually looks like in practice Great read!

34

1 Comment

Yogi Goel spent 8 years at Rubrik from Series C through IPO, where he learned what it takes to redefine a stagnant market and scale to unicorn status. He co-founded Maxima with a mission to help finance teams spend less time on mundane work and more time maximizing company performance. He joined me on BUILDERS to discuss: - How he validated the idea pre-product through cold calls and got customers to pay $3-5k for POCs based on Figma mockups alone - Why customers (Scale AI, Rippling) forced them to build 4-5 modules from day one instead of one narrow product - How their ICP evolved from thinking 10-30 person companies would adopt first, but got pulled to 500-1,000+ employees where finance pain is actually acute and funded - How he uncovered the three non-negotiables customers demanded: accuracy/auditability, data integration capabilities, and breadth over depth Full ep below:

40

4 Comments

Vianai Systems, Inc.'s badass CTO, Navin Budhiraja, doing his thing. Insightful interview on the technological, professional and societal implications of AI and the need for enterprise grade AI technology to truly drive business performance.

2

#edgeai is hot and investors are getting into it - the frontier of AI is efficacy and closing the gap between where the data is created and where the AI is “actioned.” This talk at EDGE AI San Diego 2026 with Harinderpal (Hans) Hanspal will be a critical discussion of this new opportunity. See you there - https://lnkd.in/g4btc5Gd

11

1 Comment

Jyoti Bansal joins Mudassar Malik for the Season 4 premiere of The Builders Playbook to share an honest look at scaling without losing quality, speed, or accountability. They dig into Jyoti’s journey from engineer to founder, the investor question that pushed him to go all-in on AppDynamics, and the lessons he brings to building at Harness today. You’ll hear about: ✓ Turning one focused use case into a platform. ✓ Harness’s “startup within a startup” model. ✓ Why small, AI-enabled teams move faster. 🎧 If you’re building or scaling, this one’s packed with practical takeaways: https://lnkd.in/enrHvuU3

12

Had a wonderful time speaking with Shruti Mishra from CNBC-TV18, sharing the journey we've been on at SaveIN and where we’re headed next. From starting with the vision to make healthcare more accessible to now building one of India’s largest outpatient wellness networks, it’s been a humbling and energizing ride. With welUp, we’re addressing a fundamental gap — the fact that most healthcare systems kick in after you fall sick. But real wellness is proactive, everyday, and personalized. That’s the future we’re building. 🎥 Catch the full conversation with CNBC here. #SaveIN #welUp #CNBCFeature #HealthcareInnovation #FounderJourney #YCombinator #Startups #OutpatientCare #IndiaHealthTech #FoundersVoice

117

4 Comments

Here is a framework for nations to work with revolutions such as #AI and #Quantum. First you have your people learn, then dabble and become early/late adopters (hopefully not laggards!), then become effective technical users and finally value creators. It is only then that the economy benefits from your investment, and you create sustainable job growth. While #India is a key market for #Quantum with millions thirsting to learn and actually do things with this technology, there are still large gaps between: 1. Where Quantum Computing is today Vs where it needs to be for mass adoption [Quantum Sensing on the other hand is ready for prime time and GPS compromising incidents are only increasing] 2. The specialist work being done Vs the ability to hire millions of generalists 3. What it costs to tap into the technology Vs perception of what it should cost as a commodity 4. The talent it takes to produce world class indigenous technology Vs the talent that actually exists on the ground 5... Each of these gaps will close over time. In the lead-up and as a first step, India first needs to learn enough about this technology, ideally from the very best, and spread awareness. The starting point of this journey should ideally not be from dull videos or low quality social media content, but from hands-on practical learning that is delivered through high quality polished content. Such practical training effectively complements all the theoretical content you learn in universities. Q-CTRL's Black Opal product is the world's leading interactive learning tool that gives you just enough fundamentals (think 101) required to program a quantum computer. With over 28,000 users worldwide and success across the UK (Tamil Nadu adopted it last year as part of the naanmudhalvan program). And now, we have expanded our presence in India through a network of local resellers. We encourage Indian companies, governments and universities to work with us either directly or through our contacts. https://lnkd.in/gjJWHYB3 We also look forward to aligning with AICTE standards and to make our content even more relevant to India. Waseem Shiraz, Shobhit Gupta, Nagendra Nagaraja, Reena Dayal, Anil Prabhakar, Kamakoti Veezhinathan, Ajai Chowdhry, Harshan Budke, Sunil Gupta, Arindam Ghosh, Ravi Puvvala Dr M Jayaprakasan, ISDS., National Skill Development Corporation, MindTech, Kquanta Research, RV College Of Engineering, Sanjay Chittore, Uttkrist Innovations Private Limited, Subu Gupta, AICTE QRDLab - Quantum Computing in India, IBM DRDO, Ministry of Defence, Govt. of India, Ashutosh Sharma, Urbasi Sinha, Bloq Quantum LTIMindtree, Tata Consultancy Services Abhay Karandikar, NPTEL, National Quantum Mission, Eltech, Andhra Pradesh Information Technology Academy ITE and C Department Government of AP, Jayesh Ranjan, CDAC Bangalore, Kaushalya The skill University

50

2 Comments

Very happy to share that Vinay Rao is joining Samaipata as an Operating Partner. Vinay brings deep AI expertise built over decades at the frontier, including senior roles at Anthropic and Google, where he worked on real product and security challenges. He understands not just what these systems can do, but where they break. He is based in San Francisco and serves as CTO of ROOST.tools, a non-profit developing open source infrastructure aimed at improving safety standards across online platforms in the tech ecosystem. After joining our Annual Summit and leading a session on some of the toughest questions in AI today, including reliability, misuse and misalignment, it became clear that he could bring immense value to our community. We wanted to bring his expertise closer to our founders. As an Operating Partner, Vinay will mentor founders of our portfolio companies on critical decisions from day one. In early stage companies, choices around AI architecture, security and governance define speed, defensibility and long term risk. For our founders, having Vinay involved at those moments will make a real difference. Welcome to the team, Vinay. Excited for what is ahead! Thank you to Cinco Días for the coverage. More information in the link in the comments (in Spanish).

286

27 Comments

Excited to welcome Adi Wabisabi to Datastrato. Adi will be leading DevRel while also contributing across growth, partnerships, and customer engagement. Adi has spent the past decade deep in the commercial open source data ecosystem, at Redis and more recently Confluent (Kafka), where he wore a range of go-to-market hats, building high-impact demos and technical content, and helping drive real adoption with developers, customers, and partners. Earlier in his career, he was a self-taught engineer who grew into a tech lead and architect, building large-scale data platforms at Fandango. As we build out the ecosystem around Apache Gravitino + ADP and push toward becoming the metadata/control plane for the agentic AI era, DevRel is a critical lever that turns strong technology into real developer adoption and community momentum. Adi has been operating in that loop for years. Welcome aboard, Adi - excited to build together.

24

4 Comments

Deepak Dastrala is quietly rewriting the BFSI playbook — faster, cheaper, smarter decisions all in a day’s work. From 4-hour data marathons to 50-minute sprints, he makes it look easy. AI-native architecture? Seamless. Check out his latest moves here: https://lnkd.in/gpGqr4eH

19

This article, co-authored by Vardaan Ahluwalia and me lays out India's significant new Research Development and Innovation Fund initiative in the context of other successful interventions: when governments and the private sector work together, they can make a transformative difference to deep technology entrepreneurship. Equally, initiatives to help manage financial risk should be followed by structural reforms in areas ranging from intellectual property regulation, ease of clearances for start-ups, tax rationalization in capital gains and options that helps start-ups attract talent, and a visa regime that attracts leading global researchers. https://lnkd.in/gk92YSZa

60

From our PearX S25 cohort, meet Pravāh, the AI-native operating system for the electric grid When Mohak Mangal, Dhruv Suri, and Aman Gupta looked at the strain on the U.S. electric grid, they saw a system pushed to its limits. Exploding demand and unpredictable supply have made blackouts increasingly common. This costs the economy more than $150B a year, a number that could 10x in the next five years. Mohak Mangal and team founded Pravāh to help fix it. Their platform helps utilities and grid operators make real-time decisions on load, generation, and congestion, reducing blackout risks, optimizing power procurement, and bringing much-needed stability to the backbone of modern life. We’re proud to support the Pravāh team as they take on one of the toughest and most important infrastructure challenges of our time.

804

23 Comments

Yesterday’s encounter that reminded me why protocols matter more than platforms. Had an inspiring conversation with Rajeesh Menon, whose work spans the entire digital infrastructure ecosystem that’s quietly revolutionizing how we think about systemic change. From EkStep Foundation to Beckn Open Collective, Rajeesh embodies something crucial: building systems that serve rather than surveil, that empower rather than extract. What excites me most is exploring how our community-driven approach (SAOcommons) to human capital indexing (WellbeingProtocol) could plug into this broader ecosystem of digital public / common goods. The goal? Value redistribution that’s signal-based and equitable rather than platform-captured. But this conversation also surfaced some critical questions I’m wrestling with: 1) “Emission” vs “Collection” of data 2) Deep Thinkers' Collective. 3) Anti-hive-mind design - How does TheInternetOfValue preserve individual agency while enabling collective intelligence? 4) “Weaponising” context ? If you’re working on systems that put livelihoods with dignity at the center, Rajeesh Menon is building something remarkable. Worth following his journey. Thanks for the active listening and questions, Rajeesh!

45

6 Comments