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Bharat Desai

Chairman, DS Foundation Bharat co-founded Syntel with his wife, Neerja Sethi from their apartment in Troy, Michigan, in 1980 with $2,000, bringing in $30,000 in revenue in the first year. Thirty-eight years later, the tech consulting and outsourcing company has nearly 24,000 employees across the globe and generated nearly $1 billion in revenue in 2016. In October 2018, French IT firm Atos SE acquired Syntel for $3.4 billion in cash. Among other services, Syntel provides Software as a service (SaaS), delivering applications over the Internet. Bharat was born in Kenya, lived in Mombasa and Ahmedabad, and came to the U.S. in 1976 as a programmer for Tata. He received his engineering degree from IIT-Bombay, and his MBA from Ross School of Business in Michigan. Bharat is director of ExpenseAdvisor and Cyberstate.org and a Member of the Young President’s Organization (YPO) of Detroit. He has received the award for IIT Alumnus of the Year and been recognized by Crain’s Detroit Business as a “Minority Business All-star.” He is a board member of several educational institutions, including the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) and the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. He currently resides with his wife and two children in Fisher Island, Florida.
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Desh Deshpande

Gururaj “Desh” Deshpande is President and Chairman of Sparta Group LLC and founded Cascade Communications and Sycamore Networks. He has chaired and funded several other companies and is a life-member of the MIT Corporation. Jaishree Deshpande is a Trustee of Deshpande Foundation and the Treasurer of Sparta Group LLC, a family investment office. The Deshpande Foundation supports Social entrepreneurship and provided the founding grant for NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps™) and Deshpande Center at MIT. Jaishree currently serves as a Trustee for the Museum of Science and is involved with HESTIA Fund – a fund established to support after school programs for low-income children in Massachusetts. Jaishree Deshpande worked for the Indian Space Research Organization in Bangalore, India until 1980 before moving to Canada. After moving to Massachusetts in 1984, she worked for several companies and taught courses in computer. Gururaj Deshpande holds a B. Tech. from Indian IIT-Madras, M.E. from the University of New Brunswick, Canada, and Ph.D. from Queens University, Canada. He co-chaired the National Council to support President Obama’s innovation and entrepreneurship strategy from 2010 to 2015. Jaishree received a Master of Science in Physics in 1975 from the Indian Institute of Technologies (IIT), Madras, India. She also received a Master in Computer Science in 1989 from Boston University.
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Kris Gopalakrishnan

Chairman Axilor Ventures, Co-founder Infosys, President ISF Senapathy Gopalakrishnan, known as Kris Gopalakrishnan, co-founded Infosys in 1981, and has served in various positions, including CEO and Managing Director from June 2007 until August 2011, as well as vice-chairman. Since his retirement from Infosys in 2014, he has been serving as non Executive Vice Chairman. He also has personally invested in 65 startups through his business incubator Axilor Ventures and 10 venture funds. He serves as a Director on the Kerala State Industrial Development Corporation. He also has been the President of CII since 2013. He has funded and created Itihaasa, a digital app that chronicles the evolution of India’s IT industry.
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Romesh Wadhwani

Founder, Chairman, and CEO of SymphonyAI Romesh is the Founder of the Wadhwani Foundation.  He is also the Founder, Chairman, and CEO, of SymphonyAI. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur and philanthropist, he built three successful companies including his former Symphony Technology Group, which brings in about $2.5 billion in annual revenues. The serial entrepreneur has also founded Aspect Development, which i2 Technologies acquired for $9.3 billion in stock in 1999. He combined 9 of his companies that were AI-focused into SymphonyAI in 2017. He and his brother, Sunil, founded the Wadhwani Institute of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Mumbai in 2018, committing over $30 million. He is a member of the Gates-Buffett Giving Pledge, and was appointed by President Barack Obama on the Board of Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center. He also sits on the board of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Romesh received his B.Tech from IIT Bombay, and MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
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Sunil Wadhwani

Sunil Wadhwani is a Pittsburgh-based tech entrepreneur who has built several companies in the US and India, and over the last 10 years has launched four large social sector initiatives in India. He co-founded and was CEO of iGate Corporation, an IT services company that he grew to over 34,000 employees and sold for $5 billion. In 2015 he launched a non-profit foundation to transform primary healthcare in underserved communities across India. This foundation ran over 1,000 clinics and treated over 20 million people a year with free healthcare, in partnership with government.  In 2018 Sunil and his brother launched the nonprofit Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence in India. This has over 250 full-time AI/ML and domain experts, who have developed over 25 AI platforms in the areas of healthcare, education, and agriculture. These solutions are impacting over 50 million people a year, and are scaling rapidly. In 2021 he launched W Health Ventures, a venture studio that has created over a dozen healthcare companies in areas like chronic care management, AI-based mental health, and cancer care. These companies have since raised over $250 million of outside capital and have impacted over 25 million people. Last year he launched the Wadhwani School of AI at IIT Madras, his alma mater. This has become the largest school of AI in India, with over 400 students, 70 faculty, and 7 research centers.