Board of Advisors

Hemendra has over 28 years of experience in venture capital, private equity, management consulting and investment banking. He is currently working as Venture Partner with Bharat Innovation Fund –investing in early stage deep- tech start-ups across sectors. Hemendra is also the co-founder of ThinkAg – a platform for accelerating the adoption of innovations in the agriculture space. He is the Chairman of FICCI Task Force on Agri Start-ups. He is also an advisor to Foundations, Multilaterals, Corporates and Funds with interest in investing in tech startups in India. He has authored many papers on the subject and speaks regularly at conferences pertaining to the food and agribusiness sector as well as the start-up ecosystem. He is a management graduate from IIM (Ahmedabad) and Agricultural Engineer from Rajasthan Agricultural University.

Professor, Department of Nutrition and Food Studies, New York University
Krishnendu Ray is a Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University. He was the Chair of the department from 2012-2021. He is the author of The Migrant’s Table (2004) and The Ethnic Restaurateur (2016) and the co-editor of Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food and South Asia (2012). He was formerly a faculty member and the Acting Associate Dean of Liberal Arts at The Culinary Institute of America (1996-2005) and the President of The Association for the Study of Food and Society from 2014-2018. He is an Editorial Collective Member of the Food Studies journal Gastronomica, a Board member at the Southern Foodways Alliance, and one of the Chairs of the James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards Committee.

Vice Chancellor of Veer Madho Singh Bhandari Uttarakhand Technical
University
She currently serves as the Vice Chancellor of Veer Madho Singh Bhandari Uttarakhand Technical University. She previously held the position of Director General of the National Power Training Institute—the apex training and capacity-building body under the Ministry of Power, Government of India.She is an alumna of IIT Kanpur and IIT Delhi, with a Master’s in Power Electronics and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering. Over the years, she has held prestigious international fellowships, including at the University of Dundee and Durham University Business School, and has served as Visiting Faculty at the Asian Institute of Technology.A strong advocate for gender diversity in energy, she serves as the Chairperson of the WePOWER India National Chapter, playing a pivotal role in advancing women’s participation in the power sector. Through her leadership, the National Power Training Institute has emerged as a key institutional anchor for the WePOWER initiative, driving capacity-building, mentorship, and regional collaboration to foster an inclusive and future-ready energy workforce.Her contributions have been recognized through numerous prestigious awards, including the Women Technology Innovation Award by the Indian Smart Grid Forum, the STEM Women Award 2024 by the Government of Madhya Pradesh, and the Shrimati Sushma Swaraj Stree Shakti Engineering Samman (August 2024). Most recently, she has been honored with the SAHIT Woman Achiever Award 2025.