P R Ganapathy - Chief Executive Officer
Guns co-founded Gridstone Research in August 2005 and serves as the Chief Executive Officer.
Prior to taking over as CEO, Guns served as Vice President-Products, where he led the development of Gridstone’s product offering.
Before founding Gridstone, Guns spent 7 years at Infosys Technologies and its Business Process Outsourcing subsidiary, Progeon, in Investor Relations and Business Development roles. As the Investor Relations Officer, he was a member of the company’s pioneering NASDAQ-listing team. He was also the Head of Infosys’ North American Finance & Administration function. At Progeon, Guns was instrumental in conceptualizing and building the company’s Enterprise Services practice, and managed several key client relationships. Under his guidance, the practice grew to account for a significant portion of Progeon’s revenues and was a flagship service offering for the company.
Before Infosys, Guns was a member of the Tata Administrative Service.
Guns has an MBA from IIM, Ahmedabad, and a B.Sc. in Mathematics from Delhi University. He lives in Manhattan.
Ramesh Gopalan - Country Head - India
Ramesh co-founded Gridstone Research in August 2005 and serves as Country Head - India.
Prior to founding Gridstone Research, Ramesh was the US-based VP of Transition at Progeon, the BPO subsidiary of Infosys Technologies, where he helped clients develop and execute their India Offshore strategy. Before Progeon, Ramesh worked at Deloitte Consulting in the US where he consulted with clients on operational improvement programs. While at Deloitte, Ramesh also set up and managed Deloitte’s off-shore BPO delivery center at Hyderabad, India for over 2 years. Ramesh started his career with Accenture and worked in India and Sweden on business process reengineering and application development projects.
Ramesh has an MBA from IIM, Ahmedabad and a B. Tech. from the Indian School of Mines. He lives in Mumbai, India.
Nitin Gupta - Chief Technology Officer
Nitin Gupta co-founded Gridstone Research in August 2005 and serves as its Chief Technology Officer.
Prior to this Nitin was responsible for all field operations systems for Infosys based out of its North American headquarters in Fremont, California. Under his leadership Infosys built and deployed an industry-leading CRM system that was tightly integrated with pricing and forecasting and was a key enabler of Infosys being able to scale field operations during a period of very high growth. A case study on this CRM system was written by the University of Georgia and is available here .
Nitin has an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad and a B.Sc. in Computer Science from St. Stephens College, Delhi. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Sandeep Shroff - Vice President - Finance and Operations
Sandeep co-founded Gridstone Research in August 2005 and serves as Vice President - Operations and Finance.
Prior to founding Gridstone Research, Sandeep was the General Manager, Investor Relations for Infosys, heading Investor Relations and M&A activities in the US. Prior to that Sandeep was a founder of a San Francisco-based boutique investment bank focusing on the software and IT services sectors. Previous to that he was at Banc of America Securities for three years where he covered the enterprise software and IT services sectors.
Before that Sandeep spent nearly 10 years working in various software start-ups in Silicon Valley. His software industry experience spans the full spectrum from product conception, design and development to marketing, sales, and support.
Sandeep has an MBA from University of California, Berkeley, CA and an M.S. in Computer Science from Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY. He is a member of Phi Beta Delta and Beta Gamma Sigma honor societies. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Anurag Garg - Head of Research Operations
Anurag joined Gridstone Research in June 2006 and serves as the Head of Research Operations.
Prior to Gridstone, Anurag co-founded ICRA Online, a leading provider of information and software products to mutual funds industry in India and served as its Joint Managing Director. ICRA Online was acquired by ICRA, a leading Credit Rating agency and an associate of Moody’s Investors Service. Anurag also had brief stints with Copal Partners, a leading KPO based in Gurgaon, India and KMG Infotech, a provider of IT solutions to global insurance, banking & financial services companies, before joining Gridstone. Anurag started his career with the India office of Center for International Financial Analysis & Research (CIFAR) and also worked with Taurus Mutual Fund as its Head of Research.
Anurag holds MBA from Kurukshetra University in India where he was awarded Gold medal and has also earned Chartered Financial Analyst designation from ICFAI, Hyderabad. He lives in Mumbai, India.
Sridhar Srinivasan-Head of Products and Technology
Sridhar joined Gridstone Research in May 2006 and serves as Head of Products and Technology
Prior to Gridstone Research, Sridhar spent 7 years at Infosys Technologies handling mission-critical engagements for major Wall street firms. Sridhar’s experience includes solution conceptualization, planning and execution of multiple projects across globally dispersed locations and cultures against aggressive timelines.
Sridhar has an MBA from IIM Lucknow and an Engineering degree from IIT Kanpur. He lives in Mumbai, India.
Basab Pradhan
Basab Pradhan co-founded Gridstone Research in August 2005 and served as its Chief Executive Officer till March 2009. He is currently the Chairman of the Board of Directors.
Prior to this Basab was the Head of Global Sales & Marketing at Infosys Technologies (NASDAQ:INFY), a leading IT Services company based upon the offshore service delivery model. In his 11 years at Infosys, Basab was part of the creation of an industry - the offshore IT services industry - and its leading exponent - Infosys.
At Infosys, Basab served in many roles in the Sales organization. He established the company’s New York office in 1995 and started many of the company’s current Financial Services clients. The last three years at Infosys, Basab was responsible for worldwide Sales, Marketing and Industry Solutions. He additionally had operational P&L responsibility for a clutch of businesses amounting to a third of the company’s revenues. Basab was largely responsible for the successful re-organization of the company into vertical P&Ls in 2003. While delivering industry-leading revenue growth, he led the transformation of Infosys’ client services organization into a high-performance team, able to take on and win against global competition.
Prior to Infosys, Basab worked at Hindustan Unilever in Mumbai, India. Basab has an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad and an Engineering degree from IIT Kanpur. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Izhar Armony - Charles River Ventures
Since joining Charles River Ventures in 1997, Izhar’s investment focus is on the enterprise software and services areas. He is currently a director of July Systems, Optaros, Proficiency, ThinkFire and Virtusa. He is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Invention Science Fund. Previously, he served as a director of Guardent (acquired by VeriSign, Nasdaq: VRSN), iBasis (IPO in 1999, OTC:IBAS), iPhrase (acquired by IBM, NYSE: IBM), Yantra (acquired by Sterling Commerce), Global Food Exchange (acquired by Instill Corporation), Celarix (acquired by GXS) and ThinQ (acquired by Saba Software, Nasdaq: SABA). He also invested in Oberon, which was acquired by OnDisplay (then Nasdaq:ONDS).
Prior to joining Charles River Ventures, Izhar was with Onyx Interactive, an interactive training company based in Tel Aviv where he served as vice president of marketing and business development. Izhar also served as an officer in the Israeli Army for four years prior to Onyx.
Izhar earned an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and an MA in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Tel Aviv in Israel.
Ashish Gupta - Helion Ventures
Ashish Gupta was most recently a venture partner at Woodside Fund, investing in early stage companies. He represented Woodside on the board of Veriwave (developing WiFi test equipment) and Nusym (EDA tools). Ashish is also an independent board member of companies in India and the US – Naukri.com (online placements), Merittrac (candidate assessment services in India), Musigma (analytics outsourcing services), and Virtual Synaptics (next generation search technology). Included in his investments is Daksh, acquired by IBM in 2004.
He also invested in and co-founded Tavant technologies, a $50 million+ revenue company, where he was on the board and also the VP of shared services in Bangalore. Before Tavant, he was at Amazon.com from 1998 to 2000; which he joined through Amazon’s acquisition of Junglee (for $230 million) which Ashish co–founded and where he held the role of VP of Engineering and board member. He has also worked at Oracle Corporation and at IBM’s Almaden Research Center. Ashish has published and presented numerous papers at international conferences, as well as edited a book published by MIT press. Overall, Ashish has invested in 30+ companies as an angel investor.
He holds a Ph.D. from Stanford and a bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, where he was awarded the President’s Gold medal.
David Singer - Maverick Capital
David joined Maverick Capital in 2004 from Oscient Pharmaceutical Corporation, where he was Chairman of the Board. David is the founder and former CEO of three biotech companies: Affymetrix, Inc., Corcept Therapeutics, Inc., and Genesoft Pharmaceuticals, Oscient’s predecessor. He currently serves on the boards of Affymetrix, Corcept and Oscient, and several private companies. Before these experiences, he was the senior financial officer at Affymax and Heartport.
David received his B.A. from Yale University and his M.B.A. from Stanford University. He is a Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute, a Sterling Fellow of Yale University and on the Rand Corporation’s Health Advisory Board.
Ramana Venkata - Iron Mountain Digital
Ramana Venkata, SVP & GM at Iron Mountain Digital, is responsible for driving the Stratify division’s vision of “making Unstructured Data actionable” and its execution through operational excellence. Venkata runs Stratify’s business, and its innovation and delivery of market-leading services and software in the Electronic Data Discovery (EDD), Investigations and Records Management domains.
Venkata founded Stratify in 1999, and with the help of a passionate team of high-quality individuals and investors, built Stratify to be the leading provider of technology-enabled EDD services to AmLaw 200 law firms and Fortune 500 corporations. Upon Iron Mountain’s acquisition of Stratify in December 2007, Venkata is focused on integrating its vision of collecting, storing and protecting enterprises’ data with Stratify’s vision of making that data actionable for profit, compliance and legal applications.
Prior to founding Stratify, Venkata served at Intel Corporation working on Data Mining methodologies and applications. He completed five years of Ph.D. research in Scientific Computing and Computational Mathematics at Stanford University, holds a Master of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University and a Bachelor of Technology degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai.