From India to the World: Charting the Growth and Exits of Unicorns

Anita Rehman is Partner at GSV Ventures. Anita’s experience encompasses roles as an entrepreneur, investor, and advisor to global companies in the Technology sector. Prior to GSV, she was an investment professional at Vantage Point Capital Partners and an investment consultant at The Three Cairns family office where she invested in early to growth stage technology companies across the Consumer, Enterprise and Energy sectors. Anita is also the founder Phiren, a D2C ecommerce startup.

Anita graduated from the Stanford, MSEE and she has an undergraduate degree from MIT, Manipal. She also earned an MBA from the Wharton School of Business.

Madhu Shalini Iyer is a partner at Rocketship.vc, a Silicon Valley based fund investing globally. She was the Chief Data Officer of Gojek and helped grow the business into a $10 billion unicorn. In addition to being a board member, she started the Singapore office and played an active role in the strategy, new business development, and ‘data as a competitive advantage’. Prior to Gojek, Madhu was part of the founding team of Intuit’s Quickbooks Lending Platform. As the data science leader at Intuit, Madhu helped grow the platform to $300 million and holds 2 patents in the areas of user data augmented algorithms for financial inclusion. Madhu was also the Chief Data Officer for Ethoslending. There she built the underwriting platform and was responsible for all b2c revenue, resulting in $65 million gross market value per month. Madhu was further responsible for building and running the marketing team. Prior, Madhu was a partner at a $150m private equity fund, Stem Financial, in Hong Kong. She started her career as a senior data scientist with a leading think tank in Menlo Park, CA.

Asha Jadeja Motwani is a Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist who has invested in over 200 technology startups in the Bay Area. As an entrepreneur herself, her investing philosophy is designed to ignite young entrepreneurs into becoming disruptive change makers. “Making a dent in poverty requires money. Without a strong focus on economic growth, developing countries like India will continue to be stuck in a cycle of poverty. The need of the hour is to let technology-driven growth enable India to break out of the cycle of poverty. It is critical that we identify and remove legacy obstacles to growth as fast as possible.” All of Asha’s venture and philanthropic initiatives in India have been designed to help the nation break free of this cycle of poverty. “Exponential growth is possible through technology-enabled entrepreneurship, lean government, world-class education, and women’s leadership.” Gender equality, inclusive growth, lean government, and national security are core interests of MITLI (Motwani Institute for Thought Leadership in Innovation) – an unprecedented bridge between the US and India. Asha created MITLI as an advocacy platform designed to drive policy changes in India. A firm believer in the power of grassroots socio-economic movements Asha created MakerFest in 2013. A powerful network of makers and innovators that pro-actively problem-solve for their own communities. Makerfest is now prolific in Africa, India, and more recently in Brazil. She created India’s first network of dozens of Fablabs designed to spark a just in a time manufacturing environment in India. With help from Prof Sugata Mitra, Asha also set up India’s first self-supported School in the Cloud in Ahmedabad. This has now grown to over 60 locally managed and sustained “schools in the cloud” within South Asia. Asha is a prolific thought leader rooted within the milieus of Stanford, UC Berkeley, Google, Hoover Institute, Council on Foreign Relations, and Brookings USA. She is a limited partner in over 20 Bay Area venture funds, Acumen Fund NY, and Kawasafi Fund, Africa. As a prolific collector of Indian art, Asha is currently engaged with Stanford University Cantor Art Museum in bringing top Indian artists into a global forefront.

Gaurav Bhogale is a Vice President at Galaxy Interactive. Previously, he was Vice President at PJC Ventures in New York focused on web3 and consumer technology investments. Prior to PJC, Gaurav worked at Google in their Bay Area and Sydney offices for 8+ years. He led global product and growth strategies to increase adoption and retention of Google’s top mobile apps like Maps, Gmail, and YouTube. He began his career in tech working with PlayStation’s brand and marketing team, where he helped launch the PlayStation 3 in Asia. Gaurav loves making the most of his private pilot’s license, traveling to countries with great local wines, and hiking. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Vishal is a builder, thought leader, and innovator with the full spectrum of business, people, and architectural skills and the foresight to set new industry trends. He brings diligence and deep technical skills to develop new products, drive go-to-market strategy, mentor leaders, and rapidly expand startups. He leverages a sharp investment point of view on categories and companies and has made investments in many successful companies, such as Instacart, Ethereum, Solano, FwB, FileCoin, and Dr. Chrono. 

His expertise is within Blockchain, SAAS, Marketplaces, Finding Product Market Fit, Scaling Technology Based Companies, and Investing. 

Built a 650-person/35-country organization to be the 1st mobile IPO on NASDAQ. 

Co-Founded the world's first and largest mobile ad exchange, reaching 30B+ impressions monthly 

Facilitated numerous mergers & acquisitions (M&A) within the marketing space  

Speaker at TEDxUCDavis

Sanjay Nath is Co-founder and Managing Partner at Blume Ventures, one of India's leading early-stage venture funds. Blume focuses on Seed to Pre-Series A stages of funding and has made over 100 investments across its 10-year history across multiple funds. Sanjay leads SaaS and cross-border investing amongst other verticals at Blume. He has invested in and advises a wide portfolio of startups including GreyOrange Robotics, Dataweave, Locus, Tricog, Yulu, Lambdatest, Pixxel, Sprinto, Nektar.ai and Obviously.ai amongst others. Prior to Blume, Sanjay held consulting and management roles at Sun Microsystems, PwC and IBM Global Services (all in Silicon Valley). Sanjay got his start in venture capital as an active angel investor through Mumbai Angels. His angel investments include InMobi, LittleEye Labs (acquired by Meta / Facebook), Tonbo Imaging and Svasti Microfinance amongst others. Sanjay holds an undergraduate degree from BITS Pilani and an MBA from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. Sanjay is based in San Francisco.