VCC Pune Forum tomorrow; Entrepreneur stories, fireside chats and keynotes

VCCircle State Investment Forum Pune Edition will feature the best of Pune Inc. comprising CEOs of India's largest companies, highly successful entrepreneurs and the biggest investors in the country on August 23 at Le Meridien.

The full-day summit will kick-start with a keynote fireside chat with Hanmant Ramdas Gaikwad from BVG India Ltd and M S Unnikrishnan of Thermax Ltd, moderated by VT Bharadwaj from Sequoia Capital. They will map Pune entrepreneurship & deal making market by forging a guidebook for running business successfully out of Pune and giving key inputs that will buoy Pune's entrepreneurial ecosystem.

The three highlights of the summit are solo entrepreneur addresses by Kailash Katkar of Quick Heal Technologies, Mahesh Deshmukh of Chetas Control Systems Private Ltd and Supam Maheshwari of BrainBees Solution Pvt. Ltd (Firstcry). These star entrepreneurs will talk on how they started up, raised funding, chased opportunities and scaled up.

Our panel focused on private equity will shed light on the investor perceptions and highlight key issues tackled by both promoters and investors ranging from valuations, exits, complexities in signing term sheets & lot more issues plaguing the ecosystem. Akhil Awasthi from Tata Capital Growth Fund, Mangesh Pathak of Ambit Pragma and Sandeep Aneja from Kaizen Private Equity will share views on what they look for in a company before investing, in addition to discussing which sectors and stages of a business are of interest to them. On the same panel, Supreet Deshpande, who spun off NovaLead Pharma Pvt Ltd from its parent company, will air views on raising private equity and scaling up significantly.

The special panel on early-stage VC and angel funding, chaired by a prominent angel investor Rehan Yar Khan, with Sanjay Nath of Blume Ventures, Anupam Mittal of Shaadi.com, Pradeep Tagare of Intel Capital and Mohit Gundecha of YourNextLeap.com as panelists, will delve into the current market in early-stage investment and angel investment in the country along with the dos & dont's for the startup entrepreneurs.

The sector-focused panel on IT & ITeS will see speakers such as Kishor Patil of KPIT Cummins Infosystems Ltd, Nitin Kulkarni of Persistent Systems Ltd, S. Balasubramaniam of Zensar Technologies, Vishwas Mahajan of Compulink Systems Ltd. and Narendra Barhate of SEED Infotech Ltd share insights on the opportunities and challenges in IT consulting, hosting & cloud computing, IT infra management, enterprise mobility solutions, internet security tools and analytics.

The sector focused panel on Manufacturing & Engineering will have Tushar Mehendale of ElectroMech Material Handling Systems, Raghav Ramdev of Chryscapital, Vishal Kapur of Avigo Capital Partners, Amit Dhingra of AnandRathi Financial Services and Shrirang Tambe of OUREA Capital Advisors. They will focus on the attractive sub segments in the sector with a status check on equipment manufacturers, execution specialists & niche players.

The event will also feature special venture capital and angel VCCircle Lounge, where select companies will interact with India's topmost venture capital and angel investors in a separate enclosure.

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