Somnath Lahiri

In the expanses of India, where healthcare resources can be limited, the use of AI technology from SAP and CleaVision is casting a ray of hope for newborn babies vulnerable to Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP), a condition that – if left untreated – can lead to irreversible blindness. This groundbreaking combination of medicine and technology provides a tangible solution to prevent blindness in newborns across India. https://imsap.co/6042iqlVn

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🚀 Ramki, Prime Focus Technologies 🚀Excited to share the latest episode of 'The Vitrina Podcast', where I had the privilege of interviewing my good friend and industry visionary, Ramki Sankaranarayanan, CEO of Prime Focus Technologies. 🏆 Ramki and his team are true trailblazers in the media supply chain, driving profound and lasting changes that are shaping the future of the industry. Their work epitomizes innovation, efficiency, and the seamless integration of cutting-edge technologies and data to deliver their software solutions and services. 🌎 In our conversation, Ramki delves into the incredible journey of Prime Focus Technologies, a pivotal part of the Prime Focus and DNEG family. They are committed to ensuring premium content reaches every corner of the globe. Their end-to-end solutions span content localization, mastering, compliance, packaging, fulfillment, and marketing, all powered by their revolutionary CLEAR platform. 💡 CLEAR is a game-changer, offering a multi-vendor supply chain software that enhances task management, collaboration, and trackability along with their pioneering use of AI to streamline workflows, create content highlights, and automate video creation. 👉 We discussed their major bets and investments in AI, the necessity of productivity and efficiency tools, and the boundless potential of generative AI. Despite the challenges faced by the industry, Ramki’s optimism for the future is truly inspiring. ☢ Tune in to hear about these incredible innovations and gain insights from one of the industry's leading minds. #Leadership #Innovation #MediaTechnology #AI #Efficiency #Inspiration #globalsupplychains #filmproduction #tvproduction #postproduction #localization Listen here:

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Excited and looking forward to discussing the evolving challenges of raising capital for early-stage startups at SAASCON24. Join me as I dive into the current trends, what founders need to know, and how we can navigate this more challenging environment. #SAASCON24 #StartupFunding #EarlyStageStartups #SaaS #Entrepreneurship

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So many wonderful memories from AMD's Advancing AI Day yesterday. If I had to pick one highlight, it would be our startup panel with Vamsi Boppana, our SVP of AI, alongside my favorite entrepreneurs. 1. Ashish Vaswani from Essential AI 2. Dani Yogatama from Reka AI 3. Amit Jain from Luma AI 4. Dmytro Dzhulgakov from Fireworks AI These founders have been pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with our MI300X GPUs, helping us confidently meet tomorrow’s AI demands today. Together with our ecosystem partners, they are a driving force behind advancing AI for everyone.

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Ai : Hunanity's greatest creation for Good and Bad. To secure ourself #zerotrustai In the journey, MS brings up VASA-1 will AI model which essentially spins a selfie image and turn it into a talking clip of you. All you have to do is upload a photo along with a voice note and let the AI model do the talking for you.

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Interestingly, in the light of recent antitrust rulings, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has expressed the company’s commitment to vigorously defend its business practices. He emphasized that Google’s success is rooted in continuous innovation and delivering superior products that consumers and partners choose willingly. In August 2024, a federal judge ruled that Google violated antitrust laws by maintaining a monopoly in the online search market. The U.S. Department of Justice is considering structural remedies, including the potential breakup of Google’s business units such as Chrome, Play, and Android, to address anticompetitive practices. Despite legal challenges, Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, reported a 34% increase in profit, earning $26.3 billion in the July-September quarter of 2024. 1) Can Google balance regulatory compliance with its commitment to innovation and user experience? 2) What impact would a potential breakup have on the broader tech industry and consumer choice? 3) How should companies in dominant market positions prepare for increasing regulatory scrutiny in the evolving digital landscape? These developments prompt a broader discussion on the future of big tech and the balance between market dominance and fair competition. Your thoughts please… #google #antitrustlaw #innovation #firsttimeceos #ceosgurukul https://lnkd.in/dGFD-qAP

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ON LIVING A HYBRID CAREER: Lessons from building a hybrid career across tech, design, and business with Prof. Hiroshi Ishii at the MIT Media Lab — with many lessons learned the old-fashioned hard way: Medium post: https://lnkd.in/gAmpt84G Final YouTube video: https://lnkd.in/gAPFrTtx (4 mins shorter than draft) Slides are on Media Lab page: https://lnkd.in/gJpKkeY8 --- Key hybrid-er takeaways: - The hybrid person can occupy many points-of-views because they can see across. - And doesn’t get to belong to a single one. That takes a lot of energy to sustain in life. - Being a hybrid means becoming aware of multiple tribes, making it harder to belong to just one. Hybridity fades with age sometimes. - Money rarely comes from doing what you love. Instead, monetize your skills to fund what you enjoy—don’t chase payment for your passions. - Being a hybrid is expensive. So earn earn earn!

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#DigitalTwins with #AgentAI at #weeklywed today in 30 min at 9am pt/ 18hr cet with our speaker Sneha Jadhav Join Zoom at https://lnkd.in/g69pbesY Calling my students who have learnt #digitaltwins in 🚗 from #Autonomousvehicles Stanford Continuing Studies class and my students who have learnt #digitatwins in #Iot from #Artificialintelligence unconnected product course at LinkedIn Learning Let’s find out how #GenAI meets #Digitalrwins in #industry #productmanagement

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We recently launched a brand new season of Propel – a global business accelerator for startups in India. First started in 2021, this program sits at the intersection of three key areas – startups, exports and technology adoption – all important for India as a nation. The program has already helped 70+ brands from different parts of India make their debut in global markets with many of them witnessing strong and consistent business growth. In this season 4, I expect even more entrepreneurial energy. At our end, we continue to focus on making exports easier for entrepreneurs and small businesses across India as we move closer to our goal of enabling $20B in cumulative exports from India by 2025. Read More: https://lnkd.in/gVYvXGwU #AmazonIndia #Exports #GlobalSelling #Propel #Startups #SmallBusiness #Entrepreneurs Vivek Somareddy | Bhupen Wakankar | Chand T. Mazumdar | Srinidhi Kalvapudi | Aditia Bhalla | Amazon Global Selling

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Business Messaging using Whatsapp has truly evolved over the last 3 years to enable consumers to talk to businesses like they do with friends and family. From rich personalized experiences using Flows, Carousel Catalogs, Payments to innovation with Voice Calling for Businesses and now Meta AI, Whatsapp has truly emerged as a very powerful business tool. Customers are seeing high RoI when used in the right manner across the entire spectrum of the sales cycle from discovery to engagement, commerce, native purchases in-app to sophisticated customer service journeys. Read on for more insights. Sandhya Devanathan Ravi Garg Prache Agarwaal Aditi Mathur Rohant Shyam Rammohan Rishabh Khandelwal Rachit Jain Swati Mishra Rutuja Kagwade Ekta Agarwal Riddhika S. Prachi Dhamale Sai Gadkari Gaurav Agrawal Anshika Malviya Kirti Zadbuke Chand Ajmera Shreeya Roy Ambika Balasubramaniam Chetan Chadha Shalki C. Amit Shanawad Pooja Khanduja Ranjeet Malhotra Paras Arora Piyush Vaidya Animesh Baidya Biswas

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Fantastic panel on GTM for Enterprise AI. Thanks to fellow panelists for a sharp discussion and to Emergent Ventures for hosting. Anupam Rastogi Ankur Jain Preethy Padmanabhan Chandini M Ammineni Jason Griggs Deb Bardhan #GTM #EnterpriseAI

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CLSA published a detailed research report on India quick commerce. Recommended reading. Who will be the first to create a $50-100Bn company in India internet? #Zepto #Zomato #IndiaInternet

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Whoa…… from $22B to zero. And before this, in February, once the world’s most valuable Edtech startup was valued at $250m post money. Chilling. Any thoughts on why this is happening and insights for founders, Edtech and beyond? #startup #fundraising #valuation #chasingthebubble #fundamentals

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Shashank Bijapur co-founder and CEO of SpotDraft, our portfolio company, ran a terrific panel at the Arkam Innovation Summit. He covered a lot of ground with Manish Jethani Co-founder and CEO of Hevo Data Data, and Gaurav Sharma Founder, and CEO of SaaSLabs .    Here are some key takeaways that stayed with me: Initial journey of identifying the problem statement and figuring out the solution during the early days at SaaS Labs and Hevo Data After selling his first company in the US, Gaurav returned to India. All he wanted to do was make $4-5 K living in India, so he started out by building tools for Shopify users. But when those tools rapidly grew to half a million in recurring revenue, Gaurav realized that he could build anything, be anywhere in the world, and sell it worldwide. Manish believes that your product has to solve a personal problem in addition to an industrial one. Once you start the journey as an entrepreneur, financial success will not satisfy you. “What one problem can you solve even if the financial outcome is not that great?” Deciding whether to validate the product in India and move to the US versus taking a US market-first approach Selling in India is hard, especially in the early days. As Gaurav said, "if you sell a $10 product, you must create an invoice, and then they’ll make the payment in 60 days. So, it became very hard to make a profit. From this, I realized that India is not ready to buy software yet, so the best model would be to build it in India and sell it across the world" Manish believes customer needs and expectations are completely different across India and the US. It's quite challenging to build a product for India and expect it to succeed in the US. So, from day one, he focused on the US market-first approach. Establishing product differentiation during the early days of growing in the US market? Initially, the number one challenge for Manish was to sell a product that their target audience could build themselves. Hevo Data needed needed financial and operational data from companies, which nobody shares easily. Most companies prefer to build a product in-house and work with that tool. So, Manish decided to find initial customers who meet three criteria: they should not want to build a product in-house, they should be fine with sharing the data, and they should be from the US. Aspects of the business that changed from 0-1 to 1-10 journey and beyond To get initial customers, Gaurav decided to integrate his product into larger companies to get more eyes on it. To sustain this growth, Gaurav bet on excellent customer service, which is “an unfair advantage for Indian SaaS,” as he says. His customer service and fast responses became the talk of the town amongst his customers. Here’s the full video video. Well worth your time to listen to three $10M+ ARR SaaS founders at the top of their game.   Arkam Ventures https://lnkd.in/gP_YT-gV

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Congrats to Zingly.ai, Gaurav Passi and the entire team on their launch. We are proud to be investors from Day 1. This is once in a decade style opportunity. It's 2024, and You and I, as customers, still continue to struggle with 1-800 numbers, ineffective AI Chatbots and spelling our names, account numbers and other info over and over again ... It's time to change all that. Zingly lets a business's customers drive the experience they want as they want it (quick answer from AI or a real conversation with human agents or a hybrid), how they want it (text, audio, video), and from any device without having to repeat info over and over again - all from a single personalized Zingly Room. Sounds obvious! But the best ideas are the simple obvious ones! #FutureOfCX #AIRevolution #CustomerExperience #Startups #Entrepreneurship #VentureCapital https://lnkd.in/gV9mk7je

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Happening today at Empowering Beyond 2024! 2024 is the year of #GenerativeAI for the Enterprise! Join me for the panel discussion on 'Leveraging GenAI for Enabling Enterprise Transformation' with Amit Srivastav, Vikrant Karnik and Chris Donahoe #EmpoweringBeyond2024 #PanelDiscussion #Enterprise #GenerativeAI #GCP #GoogleCloud #VertexAI

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"Engaging discussion with Mr Sanjeev Chopra, former Director of LBSNAA, on #Indianmasterminds. His book 'We, the People of the States of Bharat' offers pragmatic insights into restructuring India's internal boundaries. Intrigued by the upcoming biography on Lal Bahadur Shastri, a visionary leader pivotal in India's resurgence. The interview unveiled lesser-known facets of Shastriji's life, underscoring his foundational role in shaping India's destiny. Eagerly awaiting the formal release! A must-watch for those interested in Indian history and leadership. Kudos to Mr. Chopra for enriching our understanding of our nation's past and present. #IndianHistory #Leadership #Inspiration"

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Zepto cap table - less than 1% ownership with each founder and 6-8% each with their UAE based family members. Looks like highly optimized tax structuring in case of a liquidity event (IPO). With this ownership, pushing nationalism narrative is a lost battle. Introduction of nationalism narrative in the internet consumer categories is typically not a good sign. Amazon is preferred because of its faster deliveries and better customer experiences, and not because of being American or Indian. Grocery + FMCG market has a fixed TAM at a local level with very minor increase y-o-y. It would be unreasonable to assume that because of economy growing or onset of quick commerce, an individual household will start consuming more fruits, cereals etc or food habits/lifestyle will change drastically in a short period. It will not. This means that the demand which earlier used to get fulfilled by Kiranas and other hypermarkets is getting shifted to QC. One doesn't need market reports/data to arrive at this conclusion. Hopefully, everyone could find a middle ground in this reality.

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