Introduction to ImagiNxt
Deepak Lamba, Founder - ImagiNxt
Deepak Bagla ran Invest India for eight years and turned it into the world's most awarded investment promotion agency. In July 2025, NITI Aayog put him in charge of Atal Innovation Mission with an expanded mandate. The man who spent a decade convincing the world to invest in India is now tasked with getting India to invest in itself. Has India's innovation policy produced innovators, or paperwork.
Deepak Bagla, Mission Director, Atal Innovation Mission, NITI Aayog
India's AI decade will be written in the states that move first, build at scale and execute on time. Maharashtra has put more capital, more compute and more policy infrastructure behind that ambition than any other, from the Maharashtra AI Policy 2026 to a USD 10 billion semiconductor build at Panvel, roughly two of every three Indian data centres, and AI-in-governance deployments now reaching millions of citizens. The chief minister on the playbook from a USD 660 billion state economy to USD 1 trillion, and the architecture of the decade ahead.
Devendra Fadnavis, Hon’ble Chief Minister of Maharashtra | Arnab Goswami, Editor-in-Chief - Republic TV
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Amit Kumar - Managing Director, Digital Natives Business at Google Cloud India
Every company running an AI pilot today is really running a headcount experiment. Most have not told their employees yet.
Mr. Chandrashekhar Jaiswal, GM MTDC
Every company running an AI pilot today is really running a headcount experiment. Most have not told their employees yet.
Rohit Chennamaneni, Co-Founder Darwinbox | Raghav Aggarwal, Co-Founder Fluid AI | Neeraj Bhargava - Managing Partner, Aistra Labs
Government vision on AI governance, semiconductor sovereignty and India's digital positioning on the world stage. The next chapter of Digital India and what it requires from the public and private sectors together.
Dr Jitendra Singh, Minister of State of the Department of Science and Technology and the Prime Minister's Office (Editor-in-Chief, Republic TV)
Sustainability has been a conviction for long enough. Is it a business model. Founders who built profitable companies with climate and circularity at the core, on what it actually takes to make the planet pay.
Sriram Kuchimanchi,Founder & CEO Smarter Dharma | Abhishek Jain, Director, Green Economy and Impact Innovations, Council on Energy Environment and Water (CEEW) | Manish Dabkara - Chairman & MD, EKI Energy Services Ltd | Rahul Nainani - Co Founder & CEO ReCircle
Everyone agrees India needs sovereign compute. Almost no one agrees on what it means. Gigawatts, billions, and a deployment speed the country has never tried. Three perspectives meet on stage. The policy view shaping the rules. The demand view from inside the most ambitious private AI build in the country. The operator view scaling capacity faster than anyone here has attempted. The answer that emerges will shape what India can and cannot do with AI for years to come.
Sharad Sanghi, CEO - Neysa | Gaurav Aggarwal, Chief AI Scientist, Reliance Jio
India built one of the world's most elaborate deep tech funding architectures. Most founders never touched a rupee of it. The gap between scheme design and ground reality.
Anand Sri Ganesh, CEO NSRCEL, IIM Bangalore's Startup Incubator | Vamshi Reddy, Partner Kalaari Capital | Jay Krishnan Partner, Beyond Next Ventures India | JA Chowdary - Founder, International Startup Foundation & Junicorn 100K
AI mobility, AI city platforms, and the urban planner asking whether Indian cities are physically and institutionally built for any of this. With the consultant who has rolled out smart city projects across multiple Indian cities asking the others to defend their positions.
Sridhar Gadhi, Founder, Exec Chairman - Quantela | Hitesh Vaidya, Former Director,National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA)
India landed at the lunar south pole before most countries had a private rocket. The next chapter is harder. Rockets that launch on demand, satellites that earn real revenue, an orbital economy where India owns the stack instead of renting capacity from the West. The engineering is proven. The question is whether the business catches up to the ambition.
Srinath Ravichandran, Co-Founder & CEO, AgniKul Cosmos | Chaitanya Dora, Co-Founder Dhruva Space | Manish Gupta, General Partner, growX ventures
Two schools of thought on who should fund India's future. One says global capital brings the networks, the discipline and the ambition India needs to scale. The other says India built its unicorn decade with Indian money. Both are right. But which is the right way for you.
Markus Bauer, Managing Partner - MGB Ventures | Rishi Kohli, CIO JioBlackRock AMC | Anirudh Damani, Managing Partner, Artha Venture Fund
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ChatGPT does not know what a kirana store is. Gemini struggles with Hinglish. Every foundational model currently shaping India's AI future was built for someone else.
Rishi Bal - CEO, BharatGen, BharatGen | Umakant Soni - Cofounder - Bharat1.ai
What journalism requires that no algorithm can navigate. What it means to break a story that powerful people want suppressed. What it costs. And why that cost is what gives journalism its value.
Arnab Goswami, Editor-in-Chief, Republic TV
Stefano Fallaha on building Podeo into MENA's largest podcast platform from a region most VCs underwrite. What India's creator economy can borrow and what it cannot.
Stefano Fallaha, Founder & CEO Podeo
The man who built Zoho into a global SaaS giant stepped down as CEO in January 2025 to become Chief Scientist, moved operations into rural Tamil Nadu, and built a company that competes with Salesforce from villages most of Bangalore has never heard of. Why Zoho is building its own seven-billion and thirteen-billion parameter models in-house. Why he keeps warning loudly about the AI capital bubble. The one question no other founder in India is equipped to answer. What does it actually mean to build technology that India owns.
Sridhar Vembu, Founder & Chief Scientist, Zoho Corporation
Buying AI is easy. Becoming AI ready is not. What does genuine enterprise transformation look like inside a large Indian organisation and who inside the building has to change for it to work. The operator who runs it. The translator-author who has done it across multiple boards. The systems integrator who has rolled it out at scale.
Deepak Gupta, Group CTAIO AMPL | Neeraj Bhargava - Managing Partner, Aistra Labs | Abhinav Aggarwal, Fluid AI
AI is promising to personalise medicine, predict disease before it surfaces, and extend healthy life beyond current limits. This session separates the science from the sales pitch.
Gaurav Gupta - Founder & CEO - Gabit | Dr. Nickhil Jakatdar, Founder - GenePath Diagnostics
What does innovation look like when there is no funding, no platform and no conference to go to. Three people who work at the absolute edge of what tech conferences talk about.
Dr. Vipin Kumar, Chief Scientist National Innovation Foundation | Prerana Langa, CEO AKAH | Osama Manzar, Founder & Director at Digital Empowerment Foundation
India has 78 million MSMEs, 120 crore internet users, and one persistent problem: performance marketing was built for the big players. In this 15-minute talk, Hemant Warudkar shares why that's finally changing, where AI actually helps (and where it doesn't), and what every founder and agency needs to do today to stay in the game.
Hemant Warudkar, Founder & CEO - Express Analytics
When money moves, the system has to be reachable in real time. The internet stopped depending on that thirty years ago. Payments never did. Joachim Samuelsson of Crunchfish on building money, and the AI agents that will soon spend it, to stay trustworthy even when the network goes down.
Joachim Samuelsson, Chairman - Crunchfish
Every AI vendor in 2026 is selling intelligence. Most of the decisions inside Indian enterprises; production planning, supply chain routing, scenario modelling under constraint, are not AI problems. They are deterministic, combinatorial optimization problems no LLM will ever solve. Dana Alef on what AI is structurally the wrong tool for, why the ethical European Palantir is being built from Aachen, and the questions Indian enterprises should be asking their AI vendors that they currently are not.
Dana Aleff CEO and Co-Founder Circonomit
India's foremost technology policy architects on what the next digital decade requires and whether India can deliver on it. The hardest question. What gets built versus what gets announced.
Rentala Chandrashekhar, Chairman - Centre for The Digital Future; Former President - NASSCOM | Ganesh Natarajan, Chairman - 5F World; Former Chairman - NASSCOM | Purushottam Kaushik - Head, Center for Fourth Industrial Revolution, World Economic Forum, India
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The degree was supposed to be the answer. Now the job it unlocked no longer exists. What does India do with ten million graduates a year in an economy AI is rewiring from the bottom up.
Soumik Nandy, Global SVP Sales WiZR | Sujit Jagirdar - Former CEO and CIO, T-Hub | Shronit Ladhani, LearnTube
Bilawal Sidhu on world models, spatial intelligence and the AR/AI interface revolution. The technical shift that is about to make the smartphone look like a calculator.
Bilawal Sidhu, Ex-Google PM (AR/VR, 3D Maps)
India has more venture capital chasing founders than at any point in its history. It has also never been harder to close a round. The gap between availability and access.
Dipanjan Basu, Co-Founder & Partner - Fireside Ventures | Paula Mariwala, Founding Partner, Aureolis Ventures | Arijit Sarkar, Trifecta Capital
One drone carries blood to a remote clinic. Another neutralises a hostile swarm at the border. Same airspace, opposite missions, a rulebook still being written. The civil-defence line is collapsing fast, and India wants to lead both sides of it. Who writes the rules, who builds the stack, and what does the sky look like in 2030?
Commander Abhiram Sripathy - Vice President - Growth and Investment, Indrajaal | Ankit Kumar, Founder & CEO Skye Air Mobility | Smit Shah, President Drone Federation of India
The easy bet on India is obvious. This session is about the harder, longer, stranger ones. The companies that do not exist yet, the sectors nobody is funding, the version of India that does not look like the pitch deck.
Noi Cecilia Oldne - Venture Catalyst and Chief India Representative, Sweden - India Business Council | Tomoharu Urabe - MD, Investment, MIXI Global Investments | Ameer Ibrahim - Chief Sustainable Investment Officer, Hamershlag Private
The founder who went from zero to a billion-dollar beauty unicorn on how he lost it, and the trap that quietly takes down fast-growing companies. Darpan Sanghvi delivers the post-mortem himself.
Darpan Sanghvi, Founder - Cofounder Circle
You can put a thousand creative people under one roof and most of them will still never meet. Build the room. Then what? Two builders who work on that question from opposite ends.
Paul Sirisant, CEO - Cloud 11 Bangkok | Elise Lilliehöök, CEO & Co - Founder - Mingla
The promise of D2C was. Own the customer, keep the margin, cut everyone in between. AI was supposed to make that easier. Instead it created a new middleman. The algorithm.
Neha Kant - Founder & Director, Clovia Lingerie & Independent Director at BlueStone | Mahesh Narayanan, Managing Partner - GPT1 Ventures | Arjun Deshpande - Founder & CEO, Generic Aadhaar| Aditya Aggarwal - Founder and MD at Spaceman Spirits Lab
When AI takes over with only profits in mind, who really cares about the future. With the cybersecurity operator on what an AI-led threat landscape actually looks like inside Indian enterprises.
Pavan Duggal, President GAIA Law & Governance Institute | Syed Nazakat, Founder DataLeads | Osama Manzar, Founder & Director at Digital Empowerment Foundation
Every CMO has more tools than ever and less certainty about what actually worked. Brand safety inside an AI ad world. Attribution in a cookieless one. The honest conversation about why most marketing tech still cannot tell you which rupee did the work.
Gilad Kat, CEO Blue Oyster Media | Abhinav Upadhyay - CMO, CollegeDekho | Shafali Arora, CMI Director, Unilever
- Antigen
AI does the brand’s job. It cannot do the creator’s. The same tool is saving one and threatening the other, and the room rarely puts both in the same conversation.
Malini Agarwal, Founder MissMalini Entertainment | Siddhartha Singh, Founder- Antigen
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Ten million graduates enter India's workforce every year. Most of them spent four years learning things a chatbot can now do in four seconds. The uncomfortable question nobody is asking. What if the new school is just as broken as the old one, just faster and cheaper to scale.
B Shadrach, EdTech and AI Learning Expert | Shailesh Kumar, Dean JIO Institute | Vinay Swami, Country HeadPearson India
The vehicle is becoming software. The driver, the lender, the OEM, and the rider are all losing some piece of control. Who actually owns Indian mobility next?
Gagandeep Reehal, Co-Founder & CEO Minus Zero | Sanjeev Sharma, Founder & CEO Swaayatt Robots | Emma Rozada, Nexular
When AI is the core and not the feature, the rules change. Margin looks different. Scale looks different. So does survival.
Abhinav Aggarwal, Co-Founder Fluid AI | Samyak Chakrabarty, Founder Workverse | Neeraj Gupta, ChapterAI | Manish Maheshwari Head of Growth & Revenue, India - Stripe
Computational gastronomy. What happens when machine learning meets the masala. What 5,000 years of Indian food intelligence tells AI about health, flavour and the future of what we eat.
Prof. Ganesh Bagler, Infosys Centre of AI
The people fixing India's broken supply chain own no trucks, no warehouses, no stores. They run the layer above. Four operators on what changes when software replaces steel.
Swarup Bose Founder & CEO - Celcius Logistics Solutions | Kartik Jalan - Founder & CEO, INDICOLD | MAHESH JAKHOTIA - Founder, Rudra Robotics, Former Co-Founder @ Bijak
India is the world’s largest gaming market by users and one of the smallest by revenue. The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act 2025 just removed roughly 85 percent of that revenue. The video gaming industry that has to replace it has never been built at scale. This session is about how it gets built now.
Sameer Pitalwalla, Head of Gaming APAC Google Cloud | Nitish Mittersain, CEO Nazara Technologies
Five India funds in the same room asked the same questions. Sector calls, cheque sizes that actually close, the ten ideas that are tired and the three that are working. Less manifesto, more math. The session that will tell you where Indian capital is actually going next.
Anirudh A Damani - Managing Partner, Artha Venture Fund | Mitesh Shah - Partner, Physis Capital & Co-Founder, Inflection Point Ventures | Arjun Vaidya - Co-Founder, V3 Ventures | SAILESH SIGATAPU - General Partner, Anthill Ventures
Shaurya Gaikwad started building at eleven, registered a company at sixteen, and currently has more paying students this quarter than most college incubators see in a year. His indictment of Indian schooling is not that it is too traditional. It is that it stopped being practical in the way that worked. Mentorship, apprenticeship and execution first. The current system is none of those. The session lays out what a school for builders, not test takers, actually looks like in 2026.
Shaurya Gaikwad - Founder, GoLeap 360 Private Limited
More than 30 years ago, the internet transformed communications by making them survivable in the face of failure. Using India’s evolving payment architecture and emerging agentic AI payments as examples, this session examines how to transform applications by applying the same principles.
Joachim Samuelsson, CEO - Crunchfish
More than just a conference.
ImagiNxt is a stage for ideas - a playground for possibilities.
Fueling jobs, startups, capital, creativity - year after year.
