Global IndianstoryUppma Virdi: The 30-year-old Indian-origin lawyer who made Australia fall in love with chai

Entrepreneurship

Uppma Virdi: The 30-year-old Indian-origin lawyer who made Australia fall in love with chai

Written by: Global Indian

(November 3, 2021) Who would have thought that a cup of tea could propel a 20-something Indian Australian into the country’s big league? But that’s exactly what happened with Uppma Virdi, a Sydney-based lawyer, who shot to fame with her venture Chai Walli. So much so, that in 2016 Virdi was selected as Businesswoman of the Year at the 2016 Indian Australian Business and Community Awards (IABCA).

Quite the accidental entrepreneur, Virdi chanced upon the idea for Chai Walli when she was working as a commercial lawyer. Despite a full-fledged legal career ahead of her, advising some of the fastest growing tech startups and a growing portfolio of employment, IP, and commercial clients, this Global Indian decided to set up a new venture on the side. She founded Chai Walli, a tea business focused on introducing to Australia authentic Indian and Ayurvedic teas. The venture took off and soon Virdi was included in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

Check out my latest article: Chai Walli Winner of the Micro Business of the Year Award 2021 at the IABCA Gala Night! https://t.co/iF70QBdGpw.

— Uppma Virdi (@UppmaV) May 18, 2021

The girl from Chandigarh

Born in Chandigarh in 1990, Virdi was raised in Melbourne where her family moved when she was one-year-old. She did her Bachelors of Law and Commerce from Deakin University and a Graduate Diploma of Legal Practice from The College of Law. Throughout her student years, Virdi worked actively; sometimes as a customer sales representative and sometimes as a seasonal clerk. She also worked as a paralegal towards workers compensation and also completed her secondment with Toyota Motors in Australia.

Through it all, her love for tea remained a constant. Always the go-to person to make tea for family gatherings and friends, she once made as many as a thousand cups of tea during her brother’s wedding. In an interview with SBS she said, “In the Indian culture people come together through tea. Whether it’s a happy occasion or a difficult moment, tea is all pervasive. I tried, but couldn’t find many good tea places in Australia.”

Global Indian entrepreneur Uppma Virdi

Brewing mantra

Virdi launched Chai Walli in 2014 while still doing her day job at a law firm. Her introduction to tea, she says, was courtesy her grandfather, who was an Ayurvedic doctor. He was the one who taught her how to make a cup of good herbal tea. It was these lessons that she channeled into her startup and began offering Australians a good cup of chai. Her chai business began as a side project while she continued in her day job as a lawyer. She would spend evenings and the weekends blending chai with a pestle, which she would then take to the markets to brew fresh masala chai for the customers. Her tea began gaining popularity and soon Chai Walli was a phenomenon in its own right.

Initially though, her family had quite a few misgivings about this lawyer plunging headlong into the chai business. “My parents were against my decision. They wondered why I wanted to be a tea-seller of all things. That’s when I had to convince them that chaiwallas too can do something worthwhile,” she said in an interview.

Road to success

In a country where coffee was the norm, Virdi made inroads with her steaming cups of Indian chai and its various variants. She began her journey of popularising tea with seminars on The Art of Chai with the aim to educate Australians on the nutritive benefits of Ayurvedic tea. Her workshops did the rounds of social media and she began selling her tea in small stores in Australian markets. She tied up with poor tea farmers in India and imported their produce to Australia. For Virdi, this was an opportunity to familiarise Australians with Indian culture and what it meant to be a first-generation Indian migrant.

Today, Virdi’s online store sells a variety of teas and related products such as candles, pots, kettles, strainers and tea flavoured goodies. The original Chai Walli blend is made with 11 fresh spices, with the warm and cool spices being tempered as per the season to enhance the chai experience. Her workshops where she coaches people on how to brew the perfect cup of chai is quite the rage with tea enthusiasts.

Global Indian entrepreneur Uppma Virdi

Chai Walli won the best chai award at the Royal Hobart Fine Food Awards in 2017 and was the finalist at the Best Health Food and Beverage Awards. In all, the brand offers 15 Ayurvedic blends and teas with the tea being sourced from organic farms in India. For now, the lawyer-turned-entrepreneur, who was featured in Forbes 30 Under 30 is on a mission: to rid the world of bad chai.

Follow Uppma Virdi on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter.

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Published on 03, Nov 2021

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Vidyut Mohan: The Indian entrepreneur who bagged Eco Oscar for recycling agri waste

(October 25, 2021) Every year, reams of newsprint are filled with reports about the poor air quality in the country. Come winter, and news about smog in North India due to crop burning, a dismal air quality index, of a capital struggling to breathe, and schools and offices being forced to halt operations take over. In fact, the toxic haze can even be seen from outer space. The tug of war between governments and farmers looking to get rid of agricultural waste seems endless. This is when Vidyut Mohan, a Delhi-based entrepreneur stepped in with his startup Takachar. The firm has developed a unique technology to convert agricultural waste biomass into usable fuel and fertiliser, with the potential to change the way India breathes in the near future. Lending credibility to Vidyut’s work is the fact that Takachar recently bagged the inaugural edition of the Earthshot Prize under the ‘Clean Our Air’ category. Set up by Prince William and the Royal Foundation, the awards are dubbed as the Eco Oscars that honour initiatives that showcase human ingenuity in mitigating the environmental impact of climate change. The winners, who received £1 million to carry forward their work and research, were selected by a jury panel that included Indra Nooyi, Sir David Attenborough, and Prince William. [embed]https://twitter.com/EarthshotPrize/status/1450424956450480130?s=20[/embed] What Takachar does Founded in 2016, Vidyut began

ners, who received £1 million to carry forward their work and research, were selected by a jury panel that included Indra Nooyi, Sir David Attenborough, and Prince William.

[embed]https://twitter.com/EarthshotPrize/status/1450424956450480130?s=20[/embed]

What Takachar does

Founded in 2016, Vidyut began working on a solution to prevent stubble from being burnt. At the same time, he also wanted to create income opportunities for farmers. Since then, Takachar has been dramatically increasing the amount of crop/forest residues that are transformed into marketable products around the world. Takachar manufactures a small-scale and low-cost piece of equipment that uses oxygen-lean torrefaction to process waste biomass such as rice residuals and coconut shells into fuel and fertiliser. In an interview with The Print, Vidyut said, “[Our equipment] has its origins in the French-style roasting of coffee beans. It roasts the biomass in controlled air [in the absence of oxygen]. It takes out low energy molecules leaving behind carbon-rich material that can be used as fuel or fertilisers.”

This enables farmers to sell this carbon-rich material in the open market and make a business out of it. This in turn, becomes an incentive for farmers to avoid burning agri waste and break the toxic cycle of smog that takes over a majority of the country each year. "It eliminates 98% of the smoke compared to what is generated by open burning and mitigates carbon emissions,” explained the social entrepreneur who was listed in Forbes 30 Under 30.

Indian entrepreneur Vidyut Mohan

By reducing air pollution that arises due to the annual crop burning, and by making renewable biomass based activated carbon that is competitively priced when compared to fossil based activated carbon, the equivalent of up to 100 million tons of carbon dioxide can be mitigated each year.

Back to basics

Born in Delhi, Vidyut studied at the Sardar Patel Vidyalaya before graduating as a mechanical engineer from Bengaluru’s RV College of Engineering in 2012. He then moved to Netherlands for his Masters from TU Delft where he studied sustainable energy technology and sustainable entrepreneurship. After graduating from Delft as an honours student in 2015, Vidyut worked with Simpa Networks as a senior user experience researcher for two years before joining Berkley Lab as a bio energy consultant. He also joined Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s J-WAFS as a bio energy consultant.

Always passionate about the environment this Global Indian was always involved in eco projects. As a student he worked to estimate solar radiation and solar site surveys for The Energy and Resources Institute, and worked on the service system design of biogas energy services in rural Karnataka with SELCO Foundation among a host of other projects. In 2017, Vidyut was named an UNLEASH Energy Talent; he is a fellow at the School for Social Entrepreneurs India as well as an Echoing Green Fellow.

Indian entrepreneur Vidyut Mohan

After his initial research for his Masters’ thesis at TU Delft, Vidyut returned to India to work with village communities in the Himalayas to convert pine needle waste into a marketable charcoal-based product. It was during the course of this work that he discovered a way to dramatically scale farm residue utilisation through technology in order to support farm-based livelihoods. This eventually led him to found Takachar in 2016 along with Kevin Kung, where he developed the current technology to help farmers in India turn agri waste into fuel and fertiliser.

In an interview published in Tata Center, Vidyut said, “During the burning season, air pollution in Delhi is 14 times the safe limit. I want to change that. I have always been passionate about working in the field of energy access and creating income opportunities for poor communities. I believe this is the ideal approach for climate change mitigation in developing countries.”

He began by designing a small, low-cost device to roast agricultural waste at high temperatures. This ash is then converted into charcoal, fertilisers, and activated carbon that can be deployed in water filtration systems. Once the prototype was ready, Vidyut and Kevin attached the device to trucks and took it to over 4,500 farmers, some even in remote locations. They collected coconut shells, rice husk, and straw. Since inception, this device has processed over 3,000 tonnes of crop waste into marketable products.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6-pmufDFOc[/embed]

Takachar’s technology and equipment underwent a successful pilot program in Kenya where the fuel generated was sold to over 5,000 farmers. “We will now be embarking on a commercial pilot program using a commercial prototype in two parts of India. The first is at Rohtak with the World Food Programme using rice straws, while the second is near Coimbatore using coconut shells [as biomass waste],” Vidyut said.

Awards and recognition

Their efforts were recently recognised by the United Nations Environment Program, which named Vidyut a 2020 Young Champion of the Earth. The award provided Takachar with seed funding and mentorship to help tackle one of the world’s most pressing challenges.

The recent Earthshot award has come as a shot in the arm for Vidyut, who now hopes to work with 1 million farmers by 2030 and believes that Takachar’s technology could help prevent the release of as much as 700 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. The award itself was a result of a nine month long vetting process. “After we were nominated, Earthshot reached out asking to submit an application,” Vidyut told The Print. The duo had to submit a video pitch about Takachar and attend a two-hour long interview before being selected among the top 50 finalists.

“We didn’t know ahead of time that we had won. It was completely unexpected, has resulted in a tsunami of interest from so many people and has put our work on the international stage,” he added.

Follow Vidyut Mohan on LinkedIn and Twitter

Reading Time: 10 mins

Born in Chicago, settled in India, Anjum Babukhan set up a school that makes a difference

(October 7, 2021) Anjum Babukhan's is an unconventional story. Born and brought up in Chicago, she moved to India for her husband. But where she could've basked in the glory of her new life, she decided instead to channel her energies into branching out on her own. A keen learner herself, she found the education system in the country outdated and set out to make a change in her own small way. She founded Glendale Academy, a co-education school that laid an emphasis on holistic growth and a nurturing environment, in Hyderabad. The concept clicked and today, the brand has flourished into a chain of private schools that was ranked number 1 in Telangana and at number 8 in India by Education World. For close to three decades now, Anjum has striven to transform lives through education, which remains her top priority even today. Otherwise, the award-winning educationist can teach you a thing or two about martial art form like Tai Chi or Chinese exercise Qigong, show off her urban sketching skills and Yin-Yang art, display her Ikebana expertise, become a dance choreographer or wow people with her Zumba and Yoga moves. In everything that she does, Anjum sets the standards

e a dance choreographer or wow people with her Zumba and Yoga moves. In everything that she does, Anjum sets the standards high.

By leaps and bounds

“I do my best and let god do the rest,” smiles Anjum, settling down for an exclusive interview with Global Indian. Her desire to achieve and a passion to convert her dreams into reality led to the birth of Glendale Academy. She took off with one school in the early 2000s; 25 years later, Glendale has expanded by leaps and bounds.

“We now stand as number 1 in Telangana and top 10 in India; we are known for our pedagogy – the art of teaching and holistic curricular approach more than anything else," informs a beaming Anjum, the Director of Glendale, as she looks back at her illustrious journey.

From America to Hyderabad

Born and raised in Chicago in the United States in a conservative family, Anjum is the eldest of four siblings. Her Indian Muslim parents immigrated from Hyderabad in the 1970s. "I keep traversing between continents, cultures and conditions. Whether it was adapting as a bicultural child of immigrants in the US to moving halfway across the world to India and adjusting to the social constructs of the society here, I pick out elements of what I choose to harmonize in my symphony of multi-layered and multi-cultural being," says Anjum.

She was a high honor roll student, who won several scholarships on graduating from high school before she went on to study Psychology in the honors program at Loyola University, Chicago. While in her last year at the University, Anjum met an international student from Hyderabad, Salman Babukhan, whom she married after college. Anjum moved to India in 1995 after pursuing her Masters in Education Administration and Instructional Leadership at University of Illinois.

Entrepreneurial journey

Within months of her settling down in India, she discovered the education system here was outdated and rigid. She wanted to change things, so Anjum set out on a mission. "We wanted to create nurturing spaces that develop every child's multiple intelligence spectrum, physical capabilities, creative potential, 21st Century life skills and multicultural awareness. At Glendale, our focus has always been and remains on cultivating competence and character," she informs.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8i9DT5BbkI[/embed]

A lifelong learner, Anjum is not only keen on sharing her knowledge, but also adapts and evolves with the changing times. "Everyone changes and everyone evolves. From my teens, 20s, 30s, and now in my 40s, I have grown more effective in my career, confident in capacities, resilient in challenges and comfortable within my own being as time moves forward. In the biological paradigm, those who adapt not only survive, but thrive," says the mother of three.

Anjum has many feathers in her academic cap. Among them are the outstanding academic achievement awards in the Presidential Academic fitness awards program signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1987 and President George HW Bush in 1990, as well as an "academic and leadership excellence" award presented by Hyderabad foundation of Chicago.

The eternal Global Indian

Describing herself as a Global Indian American Muslim, Anjum is constantly pushing the boundaries. Even now, she is strong in her academic pursuits in her quest for lifelong learning. With courses like Strategy in Action and Project Zero from Harvard, courses from Cambridge and recently a Design Thinking course from Stanford D school, she exemplifies her motto of learning every day. The visionary leader that she is, Anjum says she loves to learn anything that contributes to building her own multiple intelligence spectrum.

"One should explore their many sides across identities, capacities, cultures and ways of knowing the world. Every aspect one has in them can be channelized and optimized. There is no one like you and never will be. Be the best version of yourself always," she advises all those embarking on a journey. A globetrotter, Anjum says she keeps wanting to bridge the best of both worlds with what she likes and lives in both places. "I guess we are all travelers in this world," says Anjum, who is also a TEDx speaker.

Global Indian Anjum Babukhan

Staying true to her roots

With an experience of over two and half decades in implementing the best teaching methodologies, she has also authored a book, ABCs of Brain Compatible Learning, which is a guide for all educators.

The one Indian-ness, she says, that remains with her is the Hindustani language, be it Urdu or Hindi, which is a way to know, enjoy and be enriched by culture. "Nothing can be as colorful and vibrant as ethnic apparel and accessories. But even if I feel comfortable with the secular and pluralistic ideals of countries I call my own, my belonging may be questioned by the right-wing powers of the majority at times, whether it is in the US or India," says Anjum, who has won innumerable awards, accolades and recognition not just individually but for her institutions as well.

Anjum, who received an honorary doctorate in education by the National American University and National Institute of Education and Research, has an interesting take on Brand India. "As long as Brand India maintains its pluralism, secularism and humane values on which the nation was founded upon, it will grow stronger, taller and wider by harnessing the strength of unity in diversity. If it is inclusive, striving for justice and opportunity for all, Brand India will be a potent force like no other."

Follow her on LinkedIn

Reading Time: 8 mins

India’s Unicorn Boom: How startups are changing the game

(May 11, 2022) In the last few years, India has emerged as the third largest ecosystem for startups globally with over 66,359 DPIIT-recognised startups across 642 districts. With many global leaders looking to invest in Indian market, the country is witnessing a boom in the number of unicorn companies - privately held startups with $1 billion valuation or above. Interestingly, India’s startup landscape has seen close to 100 unicorns being added since January 2019. Furthermore, the country is expected to birth more than 250 unicorns by 2025, according to the Iron Pillar report ‘India Tech Trends'. As the technology ecosystem continues to grow, Global Indian turns the spotlight on five companies, who recently made it to the country's unicorn club. MindTickle - Krishna Gopal Depura, Deepak Diwakar and Nishant Mungali In 2011, three Pune-based techies - Krishna Gopal Depura, Deepak Diwakar and Nishant Mungali started a group to take part in gamified knowledge-based treasure hunts as a hobby. The idea was not only to do something interesting, which could be at the intersection of fun and learning, but also transform the mundane life of corporates. Intrigued with the possibility of making a business out of their passion, they approached investors

the mundane life of corporates. Intrigued with the possibility of making a business out of their passion, they approached investors in 2011, pitched them MindTickle, and positioned the startup as a gamification platform for corporates.

[caption id="attachment_24360" align="aligncenter" width="699"] Krishna Gopal Depura, Deepak Diwakar and Nishant Mungali[/caption]

Ten years later, it was valued at $1.2 billion by SoftBank Vision fund, making it a unicorn company. Though MindTickle had its share of teething troubles, the founders never gave up on their vision. During an earlier interview, Krishna shared that though they were able to grab the attention of marquee venture capitalist (VC) fund Accel in 2012, over the next five years the business kept trickling in.

They had their eureka moment in 2015, when the founders realised that they were trying to sell their product in the wrong market. To set things right, MindTickle team used LinkedIn to gauge the need for training for sales executives. After realising that their product suited the US market, they focussed sharply on solving the pain points of business leaders who were looking for sharper and ready sales staff for their business.

Soon MindTickle started striking multi-million dollar deals with single customers. In 2017, MindTickle raised $27 million. Two years later, came $40 million in a series C round. Next to follow was a hefty cheque of $100 million from SoftBank Vision Fund in November 2020, which made MindTickle SoftBank’s first software-as-a-service (Saas) investment in India.

The startup now claims to have over 250 customers, and gets 80 percent of its revenue from the US, with the rest coming from Europe and Asia.

Follow MindTickle on Twitter and LinkedIn

PharmEasy - Dhaval Shah, Harsh Parekh, Siddharth Shah, Hardik Dedhia, and Dharmil Sheth

The pharma industry has never been an organised sector in India. However, a six-year-old company changed the game by bringing together patients, pharmacies and diagnostic centers on one platform. In 2015, two young Mumbaikars – Dharmil Seth, an alumnus of IMT Ghaziabad, and Dr Dhaval Shah, an MBBS from Rajiv Gandhi Medical College, came together to digitalise the medicine industry, so that one could order their medicines from a wide range of e-commerce medical stores online and get them delivered online without any hassles.

[caption id="attachment_24361" align="aligncenter" width="741"] Dhaval Shah, Harsh Parekh, Siddharth Shah, Hardik Dedhia, and Dharmil Sheth[/caption]

Since then, its B2B business has grown manifold. In 2019, PharmEasy merged with Ascent Health, to form API Holdings, which brought in three new co-founders on board – Siddharth Shah, Hardik Dedhia, and Harsh Parekh. In 2021, the startup joined the unicorn club and became the first e-pharmacy to do so with a valuation of $1.5 billion.

However, PharmEasy has its share of challenges, including the supply chain logistics. The biggest roadblock initially was the lack of digitised records. To overcome this, the founders ensured that every retailer they work with has digital records and a proper system by offering inventory management and accounting tools.

Today, the B2B pharma distribution business connects over a whopping 100,000 retailers to around 4,500 distributors. Furthermore, PharmEasy is looking to expand its diagnostic business which has witnessed a massive surge in the past year.

Follow PharmEasy on Twitter and LinkedIn

Moglix - Rahul Garg

Backed by Ratan Tata and Accel Partners, Moglix was launched in 2016 by an IIT-Kanpur and ISB alumnus, Rahul Garg. Headquartered in Singapore, its mission is to tide over the gap between B2B merchants and consumers, and develop an exclusive digital-trade ecosystem, tailor-made to satisfy the diverse needs of buyers and sellers.

[caption id="attachment_24362" align="aligncenter" width="655"] Rahul Garg[/caption]

One of Asia’s largest and fastest-growing supply chain services companies, Moglix joined India's unicorn club in May 2021 after raising Series E round funding of $120 million that boosted the company's valuation to surpass the $1 billion mark. However, the company did go through some tough time during the global pandemic. In the wake of the massive global supply chain disruptions due to the COVID-19, Moglix looked to partnering with enterprises across industry verticals to map their supply chain requirements and provide technology-enabled solutions that are customised and scalable. They even provided PPE, medical kits, cleaning and housekeeping items, and surface agents at economical prices through its e-commerce portal moglix.com.

At present, the company claims to provide solutions and industrial products to more than 500,000 small and medium enterprises as well as to over 1000 large manufacturers across India and the UAE. It has a supply chain network of over 16,000 suppliers, and operates across 40 warehouses along with an in-house logistics infrastructure.

Follow Moglix on Twitter and LinkedIn

CoinDCX - Sumit Gupta and Neeraj Khandelwal

Even though the world of crypto is still volatile with no clarity on the legality of the digital asset, two college friends- Sumit Gupta and Neeraj Khandelwal – pooled in all their life savings to start cryptocurrency exchange CoinDCX in 2018. Unfortunately, it was the same year when Reserve Bank of India issued a banking ban on crypto transactions. Several crypto startups had to shut shop or continue operations while navigating numerous roadblocks. CoinDCX, too, decided to fight the uphill battle and was among the few players that contested the regulator’s ban in court.

[caption id="attachment_24363" align="aligncenter" width="707"] Sumit Gupta and Neeraj Khandelwal[/caption]

In March 2020, the Supreme Court lifted the ban on cryptocurrency exchanges and one-and-a-half years later, CoinDCX became the first crypto startup to enter the unicorn club with a $90 million funding led by B Capital. During an interview, Sumit shared that the CoinDCX team has seen the total spectrum of fundraising in the space during their journey. What helped them was keeping their heads down and focusing on building their company.

With over 3.5 million users, CoinDCX is now aiming to make crypto more accessible in India and accelerate its efforts of bringing 50 million Indians into the crypto fold.

Follow CoinDCX on Twitter and LinkedIn

GlobalBees - Deepak Khetan, Nitin Agarwal, and Supam Maheshwari

Based on the Thrasio model, e-commerce startup GlobalBees was founded in May 2021 by FirstCry founder Supam Maheshwari and Edelweiss’ former President Nitin Agarwal. The idea was to acquire digital-first brands across categories such as beauty, nutrition, food, fitness, personal care, lifestyle, home, sports and lifestyle, which have a revenue rate of $1 million to $20 million, and help them scale up and grow. In just seven months, GlobalBees made it to the unicorn list in December 2021, by raising $150 million in a Series A financing round led by FirstCry.

[caption id="attachment_24364" align="aligncenter" width="750"] Deepak Khetan, Nitin Agarwal, and Supam Maheshwari[/caption]

In the last few years, many ecommerce brands have cropped up in India, owing to the evolution of the ecosystem with better logistics, deeper internet penetration, and increased consumer interest and trust. However, what make GlobalBees different is their ambition to build the product and focus on innovation. The company acquires and partners with sellers on Amazon and equips them with capabilities across marketing and growth, technology, distribution, sourcing, branding, warehousing, logistics, R&D, product development, and operations — all things essential to rapidly scale the brands in the digital space.

GlobalBees has acquired 12 brands across categories, including The Better Home, Prolixr, Absorbia, Yellow Chimes, HealthyHey, and others. Presently, the company’s strategy is to work with these and build them up.

Follow GlobalBees on Twitter and LinkedIn

Reading Time: 7 mins

Pankaj Agarwal: The Indian entrepreneur changing edtech for rural India

(August 10, 2021; 6.30 pm) That learning will increasingly go digital is a given. Especially, in light of the pandemic that has brought the world to its knees and shut schools and colleges across the globe. 2020, touted to be the year of edtech startups, saw several enterprises step in to provide solutions for a smooth takeover of virtual classrooms. However, there was one glaring gap that couldn’t be bridged — what of rural India with its digital divide? That is when entrepreneur Pankaj Agarwal decided to introduce an app Class Saathi through his startup TagHive. The app works equally well in classrooms with and without computers. The solution does not require internet or electricity to work; only a smartphone for the teacher. The service uses a clicker solution that works alongside a mobile phone app which works well even in the offline mode – making internet connectivity issues redundant. In fact, one of Agarwal’s key focus areas has been to create solutions that will help reduce the dropout rates in India’s schools. His work, got him noticed and the 38-year-old was featured in Fortune’s 40 Under 40 list this year. [embed]https://twitter.com/DoRA_IITK/status/1400290649266552833?s=20[/embed] Agarwal’s mission has been to reduce dropout rates in schools. In an interview with The

n to create solutions that will help reduce the dropout rates in India’s schools. His work, got him noticed and the 38-year-old was featured in Fortune’s 40 Under 40 list this year.

[embed]https://twitter.com/DoRA_IITK/status/1400290649266552833?s=20[/embed]

Agarwal’s mission has been to reduce dropout rates in schools. In an interview with The Week, he said,

"The dropout rates widen as we go from grade 1 to grade 8. Our focus is to reduce the gap in the early stage."

According to Agarwal, a leading reason for the high dropout rates in India’s government schools is the learning gap that widens as the grade progresses. Class Saathi offers teachers special features to identify and reduce these gaps.

Journey to the top

According to his LinkedIn page, Agarwal knows the value of good education.

“I come from a small village in India which had no good schools. From there, I went on to study in the best of schools across 3 countries. That led me to believe that education is a great equalizer in life and that technology can help improve the quality of education,” he says.

Agarwal did his B.Tech in Electronics and Electrical Engineering from IIT-Kanpur before moving to Seoul for his Masters at Seoul National University as a Samsung GSP Scholar. Upon his graduation, he joined Samsung Electronics in South Korea and worked there for over three years.

His thirst for knowledge though drove him to aspire higher. In 2010, Agarwal became the first international employee to be sponsored by Samsung for an overseas MBA and studied at Harvard Business School. This was followed by four more years at Samsung in South Korea: first as advisor to the CTO and then as Creative Leader at Tag+.

[caption id="attachment_7090" align="aligncenter" width="650"] That is where Pankaj Agarwal’s TagHive stepped in with its app Class Saathi which works equally well in classrooms with and without computers. Pankaj Agarwal[/caption]

Entrepreneurial journey

All along though, Agarwal knew he wanted to do something to give back to his country; especially in the education space. So, in April 2017 he quit his cushy job to dive headlong into entrepreneurship and founded TagHive, a South Korea-headquartered company that was seed funded by Samsung Ventures. Under TagHive, Agarwal launched Class Saathi, a learning solution tailor made for India. Requiring no electricity, internet connectivity, low maintenance and low cost, it is perfect for classrooms across the country; especially in rural India where the digital divide is a glaring chasm of uncertainty.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PxgJBMq7Po[/embed]

Based on the concept of quizzes, Class Saathi provides students with clickers which connect via Bluetooth with the teacher’s smartphone. The startup also ran a pilot project in Uttar Pradesh which found that attendance and learning outcomes of students had gone up significantly within a month. This led the UP government to invite TagHive to deploy its solutions across 200 schools, followed by a project for the Madhya Pradesh government covering 2,000 schools. Agarwal told The Week,

"Class Saathi is a lens that lets us now see things that were not possible earlier. It gives schools and governments tangible data to evaluate and assess the educational system."

When the pandemic struck last year and schools across the country were forced to shut down, Class Saathi began to focus on its at-home learning app with content for Math and Science tailored for classes VI-X based on the NCERT syllabus. The self-learning app can be used by students at home for self-evaluation and to gauge the learning process.

According to data by UNESCO, 1.2 billion children are out of school globally due to the pandemic and the unprecedented toll it has been taking on our education system. This is where an edtech solution such as Class Saathi steps in to ensure that students continue to be able to access education and Agarwal’s unique perspective has been helping the startup offer India unique solutions.

Reading Time: 8 mins

Mohit Aron: The Indian-origin techie who went from building Google File Systems to be known as ‘father of hyperconvergence’

(October 27, 2021) Back in the day, when someone wanted to launch or run an IT firm, they had a number of things to check off their lists: buy computer servers from one vendor, storage from another, and then connect the two with expensive networking before running applications. Needless to say, the process was cumbersome, expensive and hard to manage. That is, until, in stepped Mohit Aron, an enterprising Indian entrepreneur, with a solution that changed the way the IT industry functions. He built an IT framework that combines storage, computing, and networking into a single system to reduce complexity and increase scalability. Today, Aron is known as the Father of Hyperconvergence, the main technology at his first startup Nutanix, now a public company valued at over $5 billion. He then went on to set up Cohesity, which develops software that allows IT professionals to backup, manage, and gain insights from their data, across multiple systems or cloud providers. His ingenuity earned him the CRN Top 25 Innovators of 2012 title; in 2016, Cohesity was on the list of 10 Storage Emerging Vendors You Need To Know, and was also listed as one of the Top 25 Disruptors of 2016. From Chandigarh to the world Born and brought up in Chandigarh, Aron grew up with parents who encouraged him

25 Innovators of 2012 title; in 2016, Cohesity was on the list of 10 Storage Emerging Vendors You Need To Know, and was also listed as one of the Top 25 Disruptors of 2016.

Global Indian entrepreneur Mohit Aron

From Chandigarh to the world

Born and brought up in Chandigarh, Aron grew up with parents who encouraged him to expand his horizons. His father worked with the Indian Forest Services, while his mother was a homemaker. In the India of the late 1980s computers were still relatively low on the popularity charts and therefore not everyone’s first career choice. However, Aron had heard people say that computers were the future; it piqued his curiosity. With a high JEE rank, the Chandigarh lad found himself a spot in the prestigious IIT-Delhi's Computer Science stream in 1991. The institute had just received a donation of mainframe computers from a British company and the blinking lights and futuristic sounds at IIT-Delhi's computer center had Aron hooked. It was a whole new world.

This curiosity and interest soon developed into a passion and he would spend hours programming: Unix, C and C++ became his best friends. According to an interview in YourStory, Aron said that he soon came to be regarded as one of the best programmers in his batch. “I would get lost in the world of coding. It was a world of its own and nothing else mattered while I was at it. It was all science with no room for ambiguity, only logic,” he said.

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Soon after he graduated from IIT in 1995, he moved to the US for his Masters and then PhD in Computer Science from Rice University in Houston. It was here that his passion for the subject grew; he specialised in distributed operating systems. During his PhD, he built the first scalable web server, the concepts of his research were used by IBM in running the web server for the Olympics in the 90s.

The beginning of a fruitful journey

Aron began his professional journey with Zambeel, a California-based data startup, as a principal software engineer before joining Google as a staff engineer. Here, he was an integral part of the team that built the Google File Systems, that are still used by the tech giant to store and manage data.

Incidentally, Aron was offered a job by a Google engineer soon after his PhD, but he chose to forego it to join Zambeel, which was building distributed storage technology, an area that fascinated him. As luck would have it, the dotcom bust put a spanner in the works for the startup and Aron was once again approached by the Google engineer. This time, he decided to take up the job as it was clear to him that the company was going to be a game changer. That Google engineer is Jeff Dean, the brain behind the company’s tech projects and the current lead of its AI division.

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His time at Google taught Aron how to build big systems that could be scaled. By 2007, he was ready to branch out on his own and bring his learnings to the real world; but he didn’t know the first thing about building a company. So, he joined data warehousing startup Aster Data Systems where he learnt what to do and not to do when building a startup. A couple of years later, he was confident enough to build his own company and he founded Nutanix in 2009 along with three others from Aster. It was here that he pioneered the concept called hyperconvergence (hence, the moniker). The idea caught on and today Nutanix is a public company worth over $5 billion.

In 2013, Aron launched Cohesity, a company with an estimated $300 million in revenue and growing at 70% annually. Cohesity is backed by Qualcomm Ventures, Sequoia Capital, SoftBank, and Wing Ventures. According to Aron, data growth is exploding while also becoming increasingly fragmented, which makes Cohesity the perfect fit in today’s world. The Global Indian entrepreneur is working towards making the company a single platform to manage all forms of data in an easy manner. Some of Cohesity’s clients include the Hyatt chain of hotels, Novartis, and a smartphone major. It also recently partnered with Amazon Web Services to manage cloud data as a service.

Global Indian entrepreneur Mohit Aron

Giving Back

For an Indian who’d landed in the America of the 90s with less than a thousand dollars, Aron has come a long way. And he isn’t one to forget where it all started for him. With this in mind, he makes it a point to give back in whatever way he can. Be it through technical and entrepreneurial sessions, mentoring young entrepreneurs or donating to charitable organisations. Aron, who is on the engineering advisory board for Rice University, is also involved in encouraging Work2Future, a San Jose-based foundation that helps people find employment and provides career guidance to those who need it.

He recently donated $1 million to his alma mater IIT-Delhi to help fund the institute’s computer science and engineering department. The fund will be used to support the faculty’s research activities and ensure that students can attend conferences, workshops, and competitive events in India and abroad.

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