Srini Koppolu – Chairman
Srini comes with many years of experience in innovating new products, driving global R&D; initiatives, building large scale organizations from scratch. Prior to joining SETU as a chairman Srini was Corporate Vice President and Managing Director of Microsoft India Development Center.
Srini was involved in many strategic initiatives throughout his 21 years career at Microsoft. He worked in Redmond for 9 years as an R&D; leader creating important technologies like COM, played leadership role in Office R&D; group in developing Office 95 and Office 97, and holds several U.S. patents. Srini moved to India in 1998 to set up Microsoft India Development Center (MSIDC). He was credited for setting up the Microsoft’s largest development centre outside the U.S. Srini’s contributions to Microsoft’s growth in India and global R&D; is immeasurable. Starting with only 20 people working on two products, he grew the center over the past 12 years to over 1500 people working on 20 product groups. Srini played a major role in driving Microsoft’s global software development strategy partnering with leaders of China and Israel development centers and many MS senior executives. He built a strong brand for MSIDC as an organization that innovates and makes global impact and made it the primary destination for India’s top talent.
Srini joined SETU in September 2011 to pursue his passion of mentoring the startup ecosystem and contributing to the education in India.
Prasad Pingali, Founder and CEO
Prasad has a rich technology background and is responsible for the development and productization of core SETU technologies. He brings more than 12 years of diverse experience in IT industry and immense research and technology strength.
Prior to co-founding SETU, Prasad focused on Indian Language Information Access technologies as part of his doctoral research where he built first commercial quality search engine for most of the Indian languages. Prasad is also an adjunct faculty at IIIT Hyderabad for the past 4 years. Earlier, he worked with two startups in the Silicon Valley to extract information from semi structured documents such as product catalogues. He realized this work requires deeper exploration and joined in a PhD program at IIIT Hyderabad with Vasu as an advisor. He led the teams participating in very prestigious contests hosted by organizations like NIST and CLEF and created technologies that are ranked world # 1 in the areas of summarization, question answering, etc.
Vasudeva Varma, Founder and Chief Scientist
Vasu brings scientific and business leadership to SETU with his unique background in start-ups, large corporations and academic institutions. He co-founded SETU in 2008 along with Prasad.
Vasu is also a faculty member at IIIT, Hyderabad where he is the head of Search & Information Extraction Lab (SIEL) and also the chair of Post Graduate Programs. His research interests include search (information retrieval), information extraction, information access, knowledge management, cloud computing and software engineering. He was visiting professor at UPV, Valencia, Spain (Summer 2007), UBO, Bretagne, France (Summer 2009) and Language Technologies Institute, CMU, Pittsburgh, USA (Summer 2010). He published a book on Software Architecture and over 100 research papers and journals. After earning his PhD in Natural Language Processing, in 1996 from University of Hyderabad, Vasu worked in Citicorp, New York as a Senior Consultant and then in two start-ups in executive management roles in Silicon Valley.