May 2022 – Feb 2025 · 2 yrs 9 mos · Bangalore Urban, Karnataka, India

Jul 2021 – Present · 4 yrs 10 mos · Orissa, India

Jun 2021 – Present · 4 yrs 11 mos · India

Jan 2021 – Present · 5 yrs 4 mos · Udaipur, Rajasthan, India

Oct 2020 – Present · 5 yrs 7 mos · Kashipur, Uttarakhand, India

Sep 2020 – Jun 2022 · 1 yr 9 mos · Bangalore Urban district, Karnataka, India

Feb 2020 – Jun 2022 · 2 yrs 4 mos · India

• Hosting sessions across India to train incubation managers and incubation heads of startup incubators run by academic institutions. Sessions covers:
• Session 1: Understanding startups before building incubators- Rakesh Mishra
• To build a good incubator, probably the most essential knowledge is to understand startups as your customers. Most incubators make the mistake of building their incubator and then trying to get deal flow of startups for whatever they have built.
• This session will provide a insightful orientation about the nature of startup ecosystem, entrepreneurial mindset and secrets of successful startups.
• Session 2: Plan your incubator with design canvas
• Primary focus of this session is to unravel the basic concept and the strategic concerns of building an incubator and furthermore define what an incubator will provide in terms of resources, funds, sector, location and outcome. They also learn how to prepare a feasibility study based on the initial motive of the incubator and certain other specifications like market, infrastructure, capacity, facilities, services and financials
• The aim of this session is to impart knowledge on how to run pre-incubation programs and select good incubates in line with the incubator’s objective
• Session 3: Required Services
• A good incubator must provide all necessary services depending on the stage of development, so here the focus is to facilitate identification of various services and networking to be provided to run an incubator. Classifying and categorising the essential services based on structure and type of incubation.
• Session 4: Setting up a mentoring and education program
• All good incubators must focus on both building a good business and a good network of technical mentors to help the incubators. In this session how to design and implement a mentoring program and other networking programs would be explored

Feb 2020 – Oct 2021 · 1 yr 8 mos · Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu

• It's an experiential learning PGDM program in Innovation, Entrepreneurship & Venture Development being offered by Forge in partnership KCT and approved by AICTE, Govt. of India.
• As part of this masters program, I conduct hands-on workshop sessions on "Startup Game Planning". In these workshops participants discover 7 fundamental secrets of winning entrepreneurs and learn to decode those secrets with examples and deep-dive frameworks to apply it in the context of their ventures. For first-time founders, it is a great opportunity to build solid foundation of entrepreneurial DNA. This is the kind of experience participants go through:
• "Thanks for today's session, it was quite unique the way you have drafted your blueprint for startups to follow and validate their idea. I have never seen something like this before. It was really really comprehensive, full of examples that I can relate to and was quite interesting to listen to."

Jan 2019 – Present · 7 yrs 4 mos · Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

• At Tranzmeo, we have the first Ai platform built for fiber-sensing technologies. It has one of the largest Ai foundation models trained for fiber-sensing use-cases using more than 25 million primary signatures. I am helping Tranzmeo build strategic collaborations and partnerships across the Globe and to become the most valuable players in fiber-sensing space.

Jan 2018 – Mar 2026 · 8 yrs 2 mos · Pune, Maharashtra

• BRS is changing the game the way they have innovated the solution for autonomous industrial floor cleaning. Conventional autonomous cleaning robots in the market have huge cost barriers - just to give the cost comparative, regular powered cleaning machines being used by the industry cost 10-15 Lakh INR while a fully robotic autonomous cleaning robot being sold cost upwards of 80 Lakh INR.
• BRS is the only Indian company that has successfully launched fully autonomous industrial cleaning robots in India in strategic partnership with large facilities management companies as well as OEMs of these cleaning machines.
• The most interesting innovation that BRS has been able to achieve breakthrough in is building a simple add-on wearable jacket that can be attached to any regular powered floor cleaning machine to turn it into a fully autonomous robot. BRS offers comprehensive service subscription based services to FM companies and large enterprises.
• Debashish, founder of BRS is one of the most amazing entrepreneur I have met and he has assembled a quite extraordinary team. No wonder they are changing the game.

Oct 2017 – Present · 8 yrs 7 mos · Bangalore

• Plugin is a joint acceleration program for hardware and systems startups launched by Intel and IIT Bombay incubator SINE. I have engaged with Plugin as a coach for their portfolio startups to work with them for assessment and refinement of their business model, solution strategy and overall startup game planning.
• Now Plugin third cycle is on - https://www.intel.in/content/www/in/en/do-it-yourself/11plugin3-startupinfo.html

Sep 2017 – Feb 2019 · 1 yr 5 mos · Jaipur Area, India

• Cashless catalyst is one-of-its-kind fintech accelerator based in Jaipur that has mandate of incubating fintech startups and assisting them with funds as well as ground level support in terms of business operation knowledge, stakeholder integration and governmental assistance for experiments for cashless transactions.
• I was involved with this accelerator as chief program advisor to help the core team set up end-to-end incubation infrastructure, select right kind of startups, work closely with each startup to shape up their execution plan for deriving maximum learning and value from their real-life experiments. Startups made use of my Startup DNA profiling framework to understand their venture's dynamics, identify their gaps/risk and fine tune their venture design.
• This engagement was a phenomenal exposure to fintech landscape of India. I was humbled by working with some of the finest and highly knowledgeable entrepreneurs in this sector that have enriched my insights.

Aug 2017 – Present · 8 yrs 9 mos · Bengaluru Area, India

Jan 2017 – Mar 2026 · 9 yrs 2 mos · Bangalore

Jan 2016 – Apr 2017 · 1 yr 3 mos · Mumbai Area, India

• I led the SIDBI engagement for Excubator in the capacity of chief program officer responsible for planning, delivering and managing the SIDBI platform SIDBI Startup Mitra. It was a great opportunity to work very closely with highly capable leaders such as Dr. Kshatrapati Shivaji and his team to create a national level platform for enabling startups. This engagement allowed me to also deeply look into the startup ecosystem in India and understand the dynamics of various government and non-government stakeholders involved for the maturing the startup journey in India.

Apr 2015 – Present · 11 yrs 1 mo · Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Apr 2014 – Jan 2017 · 2 yrs 9 mos · Bangalore

• Excubator's mission is to create and grow a vibrant ecosystem that is designed to take Indian
• entrepreneurship practices to a global level. We work with early stage start-ups, we help institutions to set up high-performance incubators, we partner with large enterprises to build the next-horizon of their business through corporate venturing programs. The vision that drives us for this mission is to create a powerful alternative job creation channel through the entrepreneurship for everyone right academic institutions to experienced working professionals.
• At Excubator, I was responsible for setting up end-to-end operations for the incubator, taking care of advance technology startup incubations and engagements with government entities. I led one of the largest Excubator engagements with SIDBI for conceptualisation, design and implementation of their startup platform SIDBI Startup Mitra.

Mar 2014 – Present · 12 yrs 2 mos · Ahmedabad Area, India

• I had unique opportunity to be part of an institutional curriculum experimented by MICA in 2014 to become first ever business institution to offer Gamification as credit course in India. It was attended by 18 students. I contributed to experience-based industry focused solution design learning while Prof. Kallol took care of academic learning. Course was highly appreciated by the students which was evident from year on year rise in number of students opting for this course. Course that started with 18 students opting for it, in 2018 there were more than 100 nominations for this course. I'm continuing to be involved in this course as visiting faculty; I and prof. Kallol keep improvising ways to make learning and engagement for MICA students better in this course. The most exciting part of this course is what we call Capstone project for students where they have to select a unsolved engagement problem from the industry and design gamification solution. This project involves interviews with stakeholders to discover the dynamics involved with the engagement problems, using structured methodology to conceptualise solution and building high level solution with the blend of creative thinking / design thinking. This project culminates into a demo day where various teams present their solution.

Jul 2011 – Apr 2014 · 2 yrs 9 mos · Bengaluru Area, India

• As the program head at Infosys Labs for the service differentiation research, my responsibility was to manage the portfolio of research commercialisation initiatives for the consulting and services integration group. This included next-gen technology enabled process and business design shifts for enterprises. Some of my key portfolio programs were user experience design innovations on tablet devices, next gen package implementation processes and application of context-aware analysis engines to create smart business accelerators.
• I was also heading the Gamification CoE at Infosys. This CoE was responsible for providing advance thought leadership for the emerging domain of Gamification to assist engagement solutions for businesses. CoE has created IPs that are being used to deliver Gamification engagement across different industries.

Jan 2009 – May 2011 · 2 yrs 4 mos

• As part of this role, I conceptualised and incubated the innovation center for one of the largest business units at Infosys. The innovation center was envisioned as an innovation engine that would create value through IP and next-gen disruptive technologies/methods, thereby enabling sustainable differentiation and non-linear business growth. Key programs under this innovation center were:
• Incubation of new services in package technologies
• Productization of pre-configured solutions
• IP commercialization and IP portfolio management
• Business value management
• Competency center advisory
• Anchor the thought leadership effort across the unit
• Delivery excellence solutions

Jun 2007 – Feb 2010 · 2 yrs 8 mos

• Head of Technology Consulting, responsible for cross-package enterprise architecture strategy and SOA solutions. Key experience include:
• Specialization in innovation management
• new solution incubation
• strategy formulation,
• competency building and consulting portfolio management.

Jan 2002 – Dec 2006 · 4 yrs 11 mos

Jan 1999 – Jan 2002 · 3 yrs

• Reponsible for solutioning and delivery of B2B project with teamsize greater than 10+

Jun 1996 – Dec 1997 · 1 yr 6 mos

• Develop system software on mainframe, Y2K projects, Assembler system programming, develop tools for Y2K Migration

Nov 2010 – Present · 15 yrs 6 mos · Bangalore

• IIT Mentors is a unique global mentorship program that aims to leverage the powerful network of the IIT alumni across the globe and to become a universal platform of mentoring. With the vision of ‘Touching lives’, this program is committed to offer mentoring services for technology-centric business entrepreneurship programs.
• If you are an IITian, want to connect to the program who can help or exploring support or if you are planning to incubate a mentoring organization feel free to connect to me.