The Blaze Team

Kiran Bettadapur is a practising advocate and patent lawyer. A qualified industrial engineer and company secretary, Kiran is an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur and IISc-Bangalore. He has expertise in the Hitech, EdTech, Green-Tech, Food-Tech, Energy and other verticals, in both B2B and B2C markets.

He has co-founded and bootstrapped many ventures. In his corporate career with HCL-Hewlett Packard and Birlasoft, Kiran provided strategic vision; managed operations; and, achieved business goals in international markets.

Passionate about market-driven innovation and disruptive entrepreneurship, Kiran invests in, advises and mentors technology startups too.

His book, Gita and the Art of Selling was nominated for the “Crosswords Book of the Year” Award.

Srikanta Prasad has over 35 years of experience in various facets of electronic product development and services for industry verticals like Industrial Automation, Textiles, Telecommunications, Scientific Instruments, Healthcare, Renewable Energy and Energy Storage.

Has worked in senior management positions with several multi-nationals including, EnerSys India, Schneider Electric, GE Healthcare, Tata Elxsi, Texmaco, Fujitsu and Kirloskar Electric.

He has excellent knowledge of embedded analog and 8-, 16- and 32-bit digital systems and application software, RTOS, communication protocols, IoT, Networking (Ethernet, Wi-Fi, ZigBee, LAN/WAN Bridging, etc.), embedded web servers & cloud platforms; firmware safety compliance to UL1998 & IEC60730; etc.

He has an M. Tech (Electronics Design Technology) and BE (Mechanical Engineering) degrees from IISc Bangalore and NIE Mysuru respectively.

Dr. Smitha Rao C.V., has a Master’s in Microbiology from University of Mysore and Doctorate in Biomedical Sciences from KU Leuven, Belgium.
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She has worked in India and overseas on various R&D projects.Dr. Rao’s areas of expertise encompass Microbiology, Molecular Biology, assay development in early-stage drug discovery and high-throughput screening.

She has published several research articles and literature reviews in international-peer reviewed journals (in the area of novel targets) and a book chapter on Antibiotics.

Prof. H.R. Badrinath is a Fellow of the I.I.M., Bangalore, with specialization in Finance. He has over 21 years of rich experience in industry and academics with stints at N.A.L., Canara Bank, Alliance University and Kautilya Entrepreneurship & Management Institute, among others.

His primary area of expertise is in Finance, more specifically the areas of financial markets, international finance, commodity markets, and BFSI.

His interests extend to the areas of Entrepreneurship, Family Business Ventures; Education & Ed-Tech; and related domains.

Simha has over three decades of rich experience in product design and allied fields. His expertise extends into all aspects of integrated solution delivery─ from ‘conceptualization’ and ‘prototype design’ to ‘productionization’ and ‘go-to market’. He has steered teams in the areas of Industrial Design, CAD, CAE, CFD, Electronics and Mechatronics.

A graduate of Industrial & Production Engineering, Simha holds a Post Graduate Degree in Industrial Design from IIT Bombay. He has deep insights and domain knowledge in the industry verticals of Consumer Durables, Electronics, Medical Devices, Automobiles, Lifestyle Products, Industrial Equipment, Furniture Design and more.

Sai Vissa possesses over 30 years of experience in manufacturing, information technology, ERP, systems integration and law.

An industrial engineer with PG degree in management, he also holds a LL.B. degree and a PG Diploma in Cyber Law.

An alumnus of IISc Bangalore and NLSUI-Bangalore, Sai’s expertise encompasses several industry verticals, including Steel, Chemicals, Oil & Gas, Engineering, Services
and Manufacturing, both discrete and process.

His interests are inter alia in Intellectual Property Rights, Data Privacy & Protection, Cyber Forensics and Cyber Security.

Atul Manoj is a practicing advocate with litigation experience in Courts & Tribunals. He specializes in real and intellectual property rights, civil, corporate and commercial dispute resolution.

A graduate of CNLU, Atul has expertise in the Automotive, Information Technology and Healthcare sectors. His knowledge extends into digital security, data privacy & protection.

Sanjay Godbole has almost 40 years of rich experience as a production, product design & development, system testing and process automation engineer. He has also implemented ERP and paperless office solutions. In his leadership roles, he streamlined operations too.

With a BE degree in Mechanical Engineering, Sanjay has conceived, prototyped, productionized and
taken to market several innovative ideas during his corporate career. A steadfast believer of frugal
innovation, he has designed, developed and inducted many tools, facilities, systems and equipment.

Sanjay’s domain knowledge encompasses the Heavy Electricals, Defense, Electronics and Discrete Manufacturing sectors. He loves to dabble with technology and has expertise in web design, graphics design, micro-controller programming, Protel Schematics, PCB layout, and much more.

He is passionate about his avocations of carpentry & gardening; a voracious reader, he enjoys sci-fi books and films.

Manikanta KM is a practicing advocate with about 8 years of experience handling civil, commercial, corporate litigation and criminal prosecution in various Courts & Tribunals. He specializes in tangible &
intangible property matters; debt recovery; land acquisition, insolvency & bankruptcy and other cases.

A graduate of Karnataka State Law University, Manikanta has expertise in the legal aspects of Software and Real Estate verticals.

Anuradha Kiran is a Bengaluru-based architect and interior designer with 25-plus years’ practice spanning residential clusters, 5-star hospitality fit-outs, retail showrooms and mixed-use townships. As Partner at Plan Cube Architects & Varenya Design Build (2011-present) she steers projects end-to-end—from concept sketches through MEP coordination and site execution—while advising contractors on building codes, low-carbon materials and energy-efficient detailing. Earlier stints at Tessera Architects (2006-10) honed her hospitality and corporate-interiors craft, and an earlier decade in California (Remodel West, UC Berkeley internship) sharpened her space-planning and client-liaison skills. Teaching roles at leading Bengaluru architecture schools since 2010 complement her practice, allowing her to mentor studios on biomimicry, materials science and design history. Technically, she blends mastery of modular layouts, lighting design and statutory compliance with a legal acumen gained via an LL.B, and she champions sustainable methods, heritage restoration and Vaastu. Her academic foundation is a B.Arch (1990) capped by an M.Arch in General Architecture from Anna University (2020), underscoring a career that unites practice, pedagogy and ecological responsibility.

Sumukh B is a designer-turned-technical founder who now heads Weave Design as Founder & CEO, steering an HCI-focused agency that fuses cognitive-science research with full-stack product builds. In parallel he’s working on a contextual computing-AI stack, showcasing his shift from classic UX craft to LLM-driven workflows and vector-search back-ends. His track record spans six-plus years of shipping everything from React-based marketing sites to watchOS and Swift prototypes, while experimenting with OpenAI fine-tuning, clustering algorithms and on-device SensorKit data to build context-aware interfaces. Educated in data science at IIT Madras and self-taught in Python, TypeScript, and Swift, he operates comfortably across product strategy, interaction design, and Engineering—to translate research insights into production-grade user experiences.

Nitesh Srivats is a Bangalore-based engineer-founder who now serves as Co-Founder & CTO of Weave Design, steering its research-led UX platform and end-to-end cloud stack; in parallel he incubates a text-to-UI generative-AI venture where he prototypes retrieval-augmented LLM workflows and GPU-backed vector search. Earlier, he honed back-end chops at , writing low-latency Java based micro-services for real-time messaging, and framework for QA automation that could save millions as a summer engineer at Goldman Sachs. Short freelance stints building React/Gatsby sites rounded out his full-stack palette, and today he deploys with Docker-Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, Postgres + Redis, and a toolbelt spanning J, TypeScript, and Python.