Madan Padaki is a purpose-driven entrepreneur dedicated to empowering youth through education, entrepreneurship and AI with a vision to transform the lives of 10 million young people. With over 25 years of building institutions at the intersection of grassroots impact and scalable innovation, he has conceptualised the term Rubanomics as a development framework that treats the rural-urban corridor as a unified, interdependent economic and social ecosystem — where prosperity flows both ways by leveraging the power of aspirations, youth potential, entrepreneurial spirit and technology
He co-founded MeritTrac in 2000 — India's first large-scale skills assessment firm, later acquired by Manipal Education in 2011 — and has since channelled that entrepreneurial energy entirely toward social and ecosystem impact. He then embarked on a journey as the Co-Founder and Managing Trustee of Head Held High Foundation, a non-profit that dramatically transforms rural youth into capable, confident professionals and entrepreneurs — with 2000,000+ youth and their families impacted to date. He is also Co-Founder of the Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME), igniting a mass entrepreneurship movement across India, and Founder of 1Bridge, a rural supply chain and logistics firm serving 20,000+ villages. As Founder of JAN AI, he is bringing the transformative power of artificial intelligence to India's villages and underserved communities. He has also launched the Rubanomics Global Forum, a collaborative creating new socio-economic models where human potential, entrepreneurial spirit, and AI converge into a world of abundance and infinite possibilities.
As Immediate Past President of TiE Bangalore and a Member of TiE's Global Board of Trustees, he engages deeply with India's startup and deeptech ecosystem including working with several State and Central Government initiatives. Since 2020, he is an invited Guest Faculty at LBS National Academy of Administration (Mussoorie) to train all incoming Officers of Indian Civil Services on rural youth and entrepreneurship. He was also highlighted for his pioneering work by the Hon. Prime Minister Shri. Narendra Modi in his Mann ki Baat address to the nation in May 2022. Madan has been recognised by Forbes as a leading Tech for Good Philanthropist, named Social Entrepreneur of the Year 2021, and is an Honorary Doctorate recipient.
Prof. T.V. Vijay Kumar is a Professor in the School of Computer and Systems Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. At present, he is the Chairperson of the Special Centre for E-Learning at JNU. He has earlier served as Dean of School of Computer and Systems Sciences and also Dean of School of Engineering at JNU. Also, he is a Concurrent Professor in the School of Engineering, Concurrent Professor in the Special Centre for Disaster Research and Concurrent Professor in the Special Centre for E-Learning at JNU. He has completed his PhD in the area of Databases from Jawaharlal Nehru University after completing his MPhil and MSc in Operational Research and BSc(Hons) in Mathematics from University of Delhi. His research Interests are Database Management and Distributed Databases; Data Warehousing and Data Mining; Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning; Meta-heuristic Algorithms and Multi-Objective Optimization; Data Science and Big Data Analytics; Cyber Security and Intrusion Detection System; Early Warning Systems and Disaster Management. He has served earlier as the International Students Adviser at JNU and was also the founding Director, Security at JNU.
For more than 25 years, Vishal Mathur's work has followed one thread: taking a new technology from idea to scale, with customers and partners alongside to make it last.
His journey started in customer service at Microsoft Connect in Mumbai in 1997. It moved through networking and pre-sales at Citrix, infrastructure and hyperconvergence at Nutanix, cloud and GSI strategy at Microsoft and VMware, and today Zero Trust and AI security at Zscaler. Each shift taught the same lesson: technology changes quickly, but transformation succeeds or fails on architecture, execution and trust.
Today, as Global Partner Solutions Architect at Zscaler, Vishal works with enterprise customers and the world's largest systems integrators to build security into how organizations modernize and adopt AI. Much of his time goes to translating between CISOs, partner practice leads and engineering teams so that customers and partners are solving the same problem together.
Outside the day job, he is a self-directed student of AI architecture, especially RAG and agentic systems, and often uses travel time for offline study. He believes the best way to advise on a technology is to build with it.
Vishal is based in Bengaluru.
Anand Kumar is the managing partner at Pier Counsel and has more than 22 years of experience and during this time, the majority of his efforts have been towards PE/VC, M&A, technology law, privacy laws and corporate disputes.
Anand has advised large conglomerates as well as being associated with some of the marquee startups from early to late stage. He has also put significant time and resources into developing the startup ecosystem by playing a key role in setting up various funds, including the Mumbai Angel Network and other accelerators.
Anand is also a limited partner in a few funds and as an active angel investor, has his own portfolio of 35-plus startups where he provides investment guidance to entrepreneurs and founders, and guides investment transactions. Anand has also published multiple articles, with the most recent being on the Indian Chapter of the International Venture Capital Journal. He has been officially consulted by the joint parliamentary committee on its first iteration of the Indian Privacy Bill
Dr. Jyotindra Narayan is an Assistant Professor, leading Smart Healthcare and Robotic Interfacing (SHRI) Lab, in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Patna (IIT Patna), working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, robotics, intelligent systems, and human-centered technologies. Before joining IIT Patna, he was associated with the Brain and Behaviour Lab, Department of Computing, Imperial College London, UK, where he worked on human–robot interaction and emerging applications of large language models (LLMs). He completed his PhD from IIT Guwahati, focusing on intelligent rehabilitation robotic systems and human-in-the-loop control. With over 200 publications, Dr. Narayan has contributed extensively to AI-enabled robotics, machine learning, predictive modeling, data-driven control, and intelligent healthcare technologies. He also serves in editorial roles for international journals, including PLOS ONE and Measurement and Control, and has been associated with Imperial College London as an Honorary Researcher. He received the S. K. Mitra Memorial Best Research Award (2024) from IETE and DSIR, Government of India, and has co-edited two Springer Nature books on cyber-physical systems for healthcare and rehabilitation robotics.
Beyond research, Dr. Narayan is actively working to make AI and emerging technologies more practical, accessible, and relevant to students, educators, professionals, and aspiring innovators. His broader interests include how coding, machine learning, LLMs, robotics, and intelligent automation can be transformed into useful applications, products, and solutions for healthcare, education, industry, and society. He serves on the advisory boards of PHN Technology Private Limited, Pune, and the Center for AI and Deep Learning at SR University, Warangal, and serves on technical committees of international conferences. Through his teaching and outreach, he encourages learners to move beyond simply using AI tools toward understanding, building, and applying intelligent technologies to solve real-world problems. He has also been involved in collaborative research and academic engagements with institutions including Imperial College London, UK; the University of Bayreuth, Germany; the University of Tunis El Manar, Tunisia; University of California Sacramento State, US, and researchers in Japan, alongside Indian institutions such as AIIMS Patna and IIT Guwahati. These collaborations span AI-enabled healthcare, rehabilitation robotics, human–robot interaction, intelligent assistive systems, and emerging applications of machine learning and robotics. At IIT Patna, his SHRI Lab is working on developing ProstheticGPT, an AI- and LLM-enabled framework to make next-generation prosthetic systems more intelligent, adaptive, and intuitive for users.
Mohit is an alumnus of FMS Delhi. He was the founding member of 2 unicorn startups Ofbusiness and Oxyzo; and is now a founder at Quad AI. A true believer of the talent in Bihar, he feels that it is now impossible to ignore Bihar in the Indian AI ecosytem.
