Arka Venture Labs Launch, Silicon Valley 2018

We had a packed house on the Arka Venture Labs event on Cross Border B2B Investments.  Attendees understood  from VCs and Corporates their motivation to invest in Cross border B2B investments, key factors they look out for and their successes in this space.

We had a great representation from University of Tokyo Edge Capital (a $225 million fund associated with University of Tokyo, Japan), Exfinity ( B2B focussed fund) and VMware.

Sessions were moderated by Sanjay Nath, Managing Partner, Blume Ventures and Arpit Agarwal, Principal, Blume Ventures.

We would like to thank Microsoft for Startups for the venue.

Arka spring showcase is an invite-only coming together of the best minds in the US-India cross-border startup ecosystem where we have our founders showcase their work and a set of insightful discussions on the US-India cross-border eco-system.

We started the year off with the Arka Spring Showcase where we had the best minds of the US-India cross border come and be a part of the bi-annual showcase. The session started off with a keynote by Eric Benhamou, (Founder, Benhamou Global Ventures). Eric spoke about the transformation of the global enterprise and enterprise trends to look forward to in 2021.  Arka startups did a showcase where they presented their work and spoke about their progress so far.

We then had Sanjay Nath (Co-founder, Blume Ventures), Rashmi Gopinath (General Partner, B Capital Group) & Ankur Jain (Founder, Emergent Ventures) for a riveting panel discussion on “The Emergence of Enterprise Innovation in the US-India Eco-System”.

This was followed by a great panel discussion on “Building and Scaling a cross-border startup led by Yashwanth Hemaraj (Partner, Benhamou Global Ventures) in conversation with  Rajoshi Ghosh (Co-founder, Hasura) & Shiv Agarwal (Co-founder, Arkin (acq. by VMWare).

In this episode, we feature our Arka startup founder & INK fellow Nirman Dave from Obviously AI in a panel discussion with Rafael Ugolini – a Sr. Engineering Manager at Collibra (a leading Data Intelligence company) and an Angel Investor. Along with, Avantika Mohapatra an ex-BMW engineer who now leads the charge in No-Code ML landscape as the partnerships head at AIxDesign.

Obviously AI enables anyone to quickly build and run AI models in minutes, without writing code. Crafted for a citizen analyst, Obviously AI sits in the heart of 3,000 BI teams across the world, delivering over 82,000 models since it’s launch in Feb 2020. It is a recommended no-code AI tool by Forbes and named among the top 5 no-code AI tools by Analytics Insight. Learn more on https://obviously.ai

In this month’s episode of Arka Talks, we are celebrating Women History Month featuring Sonal Puri (CEO, Webscale) & Usha Amin (Co-founding Partner, SAHA fund) in a panel moderated by Dhanasree Molugu (Arka Alum & MBA Associate at Menlo Ventures) to hear inspiring stories of women from the frontlines of being in Tech & VC. Arka Talks is our monthly fireside chat where we feature founders, operators, VCs and corporates discussing enterprise trends in the cross-border space and explore ways to build and scale a successful cross-border startup.

Sonal Puri serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Webscale, from pre-product to recently closing $26M in growth financing. Prior to Webscale, she was the Chief Marketing Officer at Aryaka Networks and led sales, marketing and alliances for the pioneer in SaaS for global enterprise networks from pre-product to Series D. Sonal has more than 20 years of experience with internet infrastructure, across four startups, in sales, marketing, corporate and business development and channels. Previously, Sonal headed corporate strategy for the Application Acceleration business unit, and the Western US Corporate Development team at Akamai, working on partnerships, mergers and acquisitions. Sonal also ran global business operations and alliances from pre-product to Series C and exit, as well as the acquisition process for Speedera (AKAM). She has held additional key management roles in sales, marketing and IT at Inktomi, CAS and Euclid.Usha has co-founded SAHA Asset Advisor – First Venture Capital Fund registered with SEBI to Empower women entrepreneurship in Technology. Invested in 11 companies, seven active, mentoring them to excel in their sectors, scaled successfully, created employment and growth opportunities in the ecosystem and impacted gender parity. The companies have focussed not only on growing their business but also on women’s welfare by implementing policies that make it favourable for them to continue work despite domestic challenges, especially during the current situation.