Board of Directors

Inderpal Singh Mumick, Ph.D.
Founder, Chairman & CEO

Dr. Inderpal Singh Mumick is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of Kirusa, Berkeley Heights, NJ, which he co-founded with colleagues from AT&T, Lucent, and Airtouch. A serial entrepreneur, Inderpal previously co-founded Savera Systems, Murray Hill, NJ, where he was the CEO and the CTO. Before Savera, Dr. Mumick was a Principal Technical Staff Member at AT&T Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, a Member of the Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, and a Research Student Associate at IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA.

Dr. Mumick's vision and leadership has established Kirusa as the world leader in mobile Value Added Services. Kirusa’s patented Voice SMS application is the most advanced offering in the market. Kirusa Voice SMS allows people to send SMS messages by speaking. A user dials * followed by the number of the recipient’s number, and speaks a short message of up to 30 seconds. The recipient gets an SMS message from the sender, and can “click” (or dial) a number in the message to directly access the spoken message. After listening to the message, the recipient can reply by voice, or by text, or can forward the message. The Voice SMS application is built on Kirusa’s patented multimodal platform that allows wireless carriers to offer multimodal applications with integrated vocal and visual interfaces. A telecom and wireless visionary, Dr. Mumick believes that Voice SMS opens up a new communication paradigm, and will account for 15—25% of all SMS messages exchanged on mobile networks over the next 4 years. He is responsible for the company's strategy, is the co-author of several key patents on Voice SMS and multimodality, and is active in all aspects of the company's operations.

Prior to Kirusa, Dr. Mumick led Savera from its founding in 1997 until 2000, a period in which the company developed its first products, developed its marketing and sales strategy, and successfully engaged with several revenue generating customers. Savera, an innovator in web-based billing, builds, markets, and operates interconnect billing software, used for billing between telecom and IP carriers for use of each other's networks, and prepaid billing software for wireless carriers. Dr. Mumick's pioneering work on the Sunrise research project at AT&T Bell Labs led Mike Miller, VP of Billing at AT&T, to comment: "this changes the paradigm of billing". The Sunrise project led to numerous billing initiatives at AT&T and Lucent. Dr. Mumick's work on recursion in SQL has been incorporated into the SQL 3 standard, and his work on query optimization has been incorporated into IBM's DB2 database. He is an international authority on materialized views technology, and his work on materialized views has influenced the implementation of materialized views in the Oracle 8i database.

Dr. Mumick is the author of eighteen issued patents, over ten patent pending applications, and over 40 technical papers in leading journals and conferences, the co-editor of a book on Materialized Views, a frequent speaker at conferences and trade shows around the world, and has been featured in media articles, including in European Communications, Silicon India, and The Hindustan Times. Voice&Data recognized Dr. Mumick as one of the top 50 Indian Telecom Diaspora that is changing the world of telecom.

Over the years, he has partnered with a host of network carriers and delivered some of the most ingenious mobile services that have effectively penetrated the telecom ecosystems of relevant markets. Kirusa’s clients include Airtel, Vodafone, Tata DoCoMo, Idea Cellular, TNM, Etisalat, MTN, Vivo, Econet, Glo, Orange, etc.

Dr. Mumick is also a frequent speaker at conferences and trade shows around the world and has spoken at events like IEEE WCNC, ACG, NJTC Internet of Things, Stanford Alumni Startups NY, ITU Telecom World, AfricaCom, etc. There has been significant coverage on Dr. Mumick in media articles by magazines like Forbes, IT Web Africa, IT News Africa, European Communications, Silicon India and The Hindustan Times. He has been named amongst the ‘Outstanding 50 Asian Americans in Business 2017’ by the Asian American Business Development Center (AABDC). He was also a finalist in the Ernst and Young, CEO of the year Awards, 2014.

He received a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India, in 1986, where he was awarded the President's Gold Medal, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1991. He further completed Mini MBAs in Finance and General Management from the AT&T School of Business in 1996 and 1998, and an Executive MBA for Growing Companies from Stanford University in 2000. Dr. Mumick is listed in various Marquis Who's Who publications.

Please click here to get a shorter version of Dr. Mumick's Biography (50 words)

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Ashish Gupta
Managing Director, 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.

Naren Gupta, Ph.D.
Managing Director, Nexus Venture Partners

Prior to Nexus, Naren Co-founded Integrated Systems Inc (ISI), a leading embedded software company in 1980 and took it public in 1990. He served as ISI’s President/CEO till 1994 and as its Chairman till ISI merged with WindRiver Systems in 2000. He subsequently served as CEO and Vice-Chairman of Wind River Systems.

Naren has been an active investor for the last ten years. Among his investments, several companies had successful public exits, including Digital Link, E-Tek Dynamics, Numerical Technology and RightNow. Exits through acquisitions include Speedera Networks.

Naren holds a B. Tech. and is a recipient of President’s Gold Medal from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi; an MS from the California Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. from Stanford University, all in engineering. Naren has received distinguished alumni awards from Caltech and IIT and was elected a Fellow of the IEEE.

In addition to Wind River, Naren serves on the boards Tibco Software, Red Hat Inc. and the Community Foundation of Silicon Valley. He is also a founding member of TiE and is an active advisor to Indian entrepreneurs worldwide.

Shirish Nadkarni
President and CEO, Communication Experts

Shirish has spent over 24 years in the Information Technology industry, most of them in the role of a serial entrepreneur. In his current role as CEO of Communication Experts, Inc. his primary focus is revenue and margin growth. He provides overall strategic direction, marketing insight, and direct technical sales along-with assisting in forging important technology partnerships both in the USA and abroad. He works with a core group of employees assisting them on strategy, finance, sales, marketing, and HR, and product and consulting sales. He is also working to manage the rapid growth of the newly founded Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) unit.

Prior to this venture, he had founded Horizon Companies, Inc. in 1989 and with the help of his brother and partner, Girish, built it into a stable project-based consulting firm specializing in ERP/CRM and high-tech consulting before selling it to a publicly held company in February 2006. He performed strategic planning, corporate finance, sales and marketing, procurement, human resource planning, project management and other senior management activities. The company doubled in revenue terms each year since inception through 2000. Revenue went from $160,000 in 1989 to about $20MM in 2000.

He had created the Horizon Incubator model by spearheading Horizon’s investment initiatives in companies such as Mobiliti, Inc., Domaingo, Inc., Kirusa, Inc. and Communication Experts, Inc. Shirish currently serves on the Boards of Kirusa, Inc. and Communication Experts, Inc.

He possesses a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and an MBA in Finance and International Business from the Stern Business School of the New York University. He has been inducted into Beta Gamma Sigma, the honor society of collegiate business schools, in recognition of high scholastic achievement.

Subrata Mitra
Partner, Accel India

Subrata focuses on technology and Internet investing. Subrata served on the boards of Small-device (now a part of Digital Chocolate) and Mu Sigma, and he is currently on the boards of Perfint, Flipkart,Myntra, and enStage.

Before joining Accel India in 2008, Subrata was a Partner at Erasmic Venture Fund. Prior to Erasmic, Subrata was MD, India, for Tavant Technologies, Inc., a U.S.-based mortgage solutions company, which was acquired by privately held Ameriquest Mortgage Capital in 2004 (Ameriquest has since merged into CitiCapital). Previously, Subrata was the Founder of Firewhite, Inc., which was acquired by Ubiquio, Inc., and later merged into Mobile Planet.

Subrata started his career at IBM's prestigious T.J. Watson and Santa Teresa Labs, working in the Software R&D groups. 

Education

Subrata holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, an MS in Computer Science from the University of Delaware, and a B.Tech in Computer Science from IIT, Kanpur, India.