Smita Deorah on founding LEAD School and building a solution for quality education that reaches beyond the metros. A conversation with Neha Bagaria on scaling businesses whose outcomes take a decade to show up, and on running a company where the unit economics and the mission have to compound together.

Jo Aggarwal is building Wysa toward unicorn scale as a global mental health AI platform. Neha Bagaria took HerKey to profitability over seven years bringing women back to work. A conversation that pushes back on the lazy read where purpose-driven companies are assumed to cap out, especially in the post-ChatGPT era where the rules on what can scale have been rewritten.

Neha Singh (Tracxn) took the company public through market turbulence. Priti Rathi Gupta built LXME into a financial literacy platform most investors had dismissed as a category. Both on the realities of going public, the regulatory terrain, and why the IPO is where the founder's work starts, not where it ends.

Suta turned the handloom saree into a millennial fashion category. Samosa Party took the samosa into organised QSR. Taniya Biswas and Diksha Pande on building authentic brands that preserve tradition, scaling without external funding, and building customer communities that keep coming back. A conversation about the audacity to reinvent India's most-loved products.

Swati Bhargava (CashKaro) on what she learned across five funding rounds, from pitching Ratan Tata to navigating global markets to the company culture that holds when capital stops being the variable. A session on visualising success, aligning vision with capital, and why delegation is the move most founders delay too long.

Paroma Chatterjee (Revolut India) on why AI isn't just faster automation. It's the bridge that finally closes the decades-long information asymmetry between banks and users. Digital footprints become creditworthiness for small business owners banks wouldn't touch. Community-level data personalizes insurance at the individual level. 70% of Revolut's processes now run with AI inputs. But there's a catch: AI can't land like a spaceship and work globally. Paroma unpacks the "onion of bias" and why the question architects should ask isn't "who are we building for," but "who are we leaving out."

Models trained on Western-centric data get thinner and thinner as they move across the Global South. Healthcare diagnostics shipping without data from Indian women is already the default, not the exception. Kalika Bali (Microsoft Research India) and Niyati Chhaya (Hyperbots) work through fairness pipelines, transparency, and guardrails, and land on where accountability actually sits. With the builders.

Niramai's breast cancer detection is built on thermal imaging the industry had dismissed, 26 global patents later. Deconstruct is doing something similar with skincare molecules most brands had written off. Geetha Manjunath and Malini Adapureddy on what it takes to back science nobody else will, and why the "technical founder" label needs a wider definition than the one venture currently uses.

Pragya Misra (OpenAI) makes the case that policy isn't a blocker, it's the function that gives a business the license to operate. Get ahead of regulation and you shape it; show up late and it gets shaped around you. Truecaller got there early and anchored its narrative as a first line of defense for women. WhatsApp got there late and had to trade engagement for safety. A sessio

Suhasini Sampath (Yogabar) on why she'd question whether she'd take the same path again, despite the outcome. A candid session on early investor skepticism, retail pushback, the storytelling advantage of being a woman founder, the valuation disadvantage that comes with it, and the strategic and emotional logic of selling the company.

Samosa Party is taking vada pavs, samosas, and chaat into a QSR format nobody else had built. Diksha Pande makes the case that brand authenticity, timing, and distribution do more for longevity than any single product does, and that relevance across generations is the moat most consumer founders underbuild.

Radha Basu's argument is that AI's next ceiling isn't more data, it's expert-curated data, and the human judgment layer that refines and grounds the models. "AI needs an eye." Her own company runs with over 50% women and high retention, which she makes the case is not incidental to the quality of the work. A session on why the future of AI depends on expert talent, not just compute.