Dhaval Ponda leads media and entertainment globally at Tata Communications. He was part of the founding media team at the company, and he has been instrumental to establishing Tata Communications as a leader in the increasingly digital, cloud-powered and IP-enabled media and entertainment industry. Working closely with his team and customers such as MotoGP, The European Tour, Sky, Star India and VICE Media, Dhaval keeps a close eye on the constantly evolving content consumption habits of today’s tech-savvy consumers to help broadcasters and content owners capitalise on the growth opportunities that the rapidly changing global media industry brings.

Akshat Rathee heads the NODWIN Group of companies and is actively engaged in creating business solutions as well as concepts. He is a computer engineer and holds a Business degree from ENPC, Paris, apart from being a prominent fellow of the India Chapter of the prestigious ASPEN Global Leadership Network (AGLN). He has the knack for identifying talent as well as business opportunities. His services have been lauded by several global players such as Jindal Steel, Vodafone and Airtel. Akshat is a passionate gamer and this dedication translates into his vision for the Indian gaming scene. He has helped bring the global esports phenomena to the country in the form of mega gaming tournaments such as the ESL India Premiership, Dream Hack, Mountain Dew Arena and much more.

Currently he is the Director of Esports and Broadcasting at LXG. He has been a shoutcaster (esports commentator) for 5 years having commentated for games across various genres like MOBA, FPS, Battle Royale, Racing etc.    

Prior to joining Paytm First Games, Anurag was Head of Esports at Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited heading Jio’s initiative in esports. Before Jio, Anurag was Country Manager (India) for Riot Games. Riot is an American video game developer, publisher, and esports tournament organizer primarily known for League of Legends.Anurag was also Executive Director of Newgen Holding Private Limited, an ICT solution provider for Smart Cities. Before Newgen, he was CEO of RedOctane Technologies Pvt. Ltd. a 100% subsidiary of RedOctane, Inc. The company offered its interactive entertainment products, the “Guitar Hero” series. During his early days of gaming in India, he was founder CEO of India’s premier game development company, Paradox Studios Limited (A Reliance Group Company). Paradox had developed 100+ wireless games, over 20 multiplayer web based games, and released its maiden PC title, “BattleDust: The Championship. Anurag played an instrumental role in the development of India’s first multiplayer wireless game. In the year 2000, Netillenium Technologies Pvt. Ltd. was co-founded by Anurag. He headed the company as its CEO, which launched India’s first web based multiplayer service, and India’s first gaming portal, passion4games.com. Anurag holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Science from Punjab University, with over fifteen years of experience in business consulting, project management and system design & integration, and ten years of experience in the gaming industry, heading development of games on more than five platforms.  

Ravi Kiran Polimera, is a serial entrepreneur in the gaming and esports domain. Winner of more than 25 startup awards in India, the GoLive group of companies has been a constant force in the gaming and esports initiatives in India. In his past avatars, he has set up and managed games divisions at Hitachi Consulting, Hike Games and RockYou India.

Sandeep leads innovation and tech strategy at Games 24x7. Sandeep is responsible for creating and implementing a technological vision to turbo-charge the tech stack, and to support explosive growth in the company’s user-base. He brings an extensive background in creating large-scale distributed systems, responsive front-ends and real-time data pipelines. Sandeep joined Games24x7 in February 2018. Prior to Games24x7, Sandeep has worked at Hike Messenger. Before that, as an entrepreneur, he built a company that allowed people to do live video streaming of personal events. Sandeep holds a Master of Science degree from Utah State University.

Backed by Google Indie Games Accelerator, Chirag Chopra is a proud founder of an all-remote game studio called 'Lucid Labs'. The studio has recently released their game 'Possessions' on Apple Arcade, which is the only game from India to be included in Apple's revolutionary service. The game has won the 'Indie Game of the Year' award at India GDC 2019, among several other accolades.Now, Lucid Labs is hard at work on their gamedev platform - wemake.games, which aims to hold game devs accountable by sharing their daily goals with the public.

Green is in charge of marketing strategy for MSI in South Asia, Middle East and Africa. With over 15 years experiences in marketing operation, he successfully lead MSI market growth by deep gaming community connection and make MSI an unbreakable gaming brand in more than 10 countries.

Managing a country with one of the most popularities, Green had brought India to an incredible growth by leading all the marketing execution. MSI had been dedicated in gaming filed for years but Green had kept exploring more possibilities in India.

Over hundreds of events and campaign across online and offline, Green successfully make MSI as a leading role in Indian gaming industry

Best known as the father of the Indian gaming industry, Vishal Gondal sold his first entrepreneurial venture India Games to Walt Disney. A health and fitness enthusiast, he runs marathons, treks and goes skydiving. A notable angel investor, Vishal was listed among the top 50 executives in the mobile content space by the UK based 'Mobile Entertainment' Magazine alongside noted people like Steve Jobs. His passion for technology, fitness & gaming led him to his next venture’ GOQii’ which is focused on helping people make a change towards a healthier lifestyle and be the force of good. He has brought his knowledge and love for interviewing people to a whole platform by hosting a podcast series ‘Beneath the Force: The Vishal Gondal Show, he has conversations with personalities from various walks of life providing a sneak peek into their fascinating lives while in his own style.

Zainuddeen Fahadh is the founder of Ogre Head Studio, an independent game company based in Hyderabad, India. He joined the Indian game industry at the age of 19 and has since, worked as a game designer, artist, producer, and studio head. Zain founded Ogre Head Studio in 2014 to make games inspired by Indian myth and culture. He was the creative mind and game director of Asura, one of the first critically acclaimed PC games from India. Over the years, Zain has garnered multiple accolades for his contribution to video games. Currently, he and his team at Ogre Head are working on the first turn-based RPG set in ancient India called Yodha for PC and consoles.

Hrishi Oberoi is the Founder & CEO of Photon Tadpole Studios, an indie game development studio focusing on kids products and indigenous Indian content.

Hrishi is a veteran of the games industry in India and has been in it since 2002. Previously, he was the Director of Games at Disney India’s Interactive division and held various roles including "Studio Head", "Business Head: International Publishing" and "Director - Games & Studios" at one of India’s pioneering gaming companies, Indiagames.

He is dedicated to growing the Indian Gaming Industry by working with Publishers, Indie Studios and organizations like NASSCOM.

Fun Fact: Hrishi probably built the first ever mobile cricket game in the world.

Anil Wanvari, is the founder, CEO and editor in chief of the Indiantelevision.com group. He has spent more than 37 years in the media industry and is considered India's foremost analyst, consultant and catalyst for the media sector.

The Indiantelevision.com group which he has set up has a mission to educate, engage, entertain and enrich the audiences it serves in the various verticals.

It achieves this through the various B2B portals the group runs: indiantelevision.com (for the cable, satellite, OTT, production, advertising, marketing, media industries), tellychakkar.com (TV show and actor news for TV fans), AnimationXpress.com (for the VFX, comics, gaming, and animation segments) and radionandmusic.com (for the FM radio, digital music and music industry).

The Indiantelevision.com group engages with the industry through the various conferences it runs: Indian Digital Operators Summit (IDOS), VidNET, News Television Summit, The Content Hub. The group executes market engagement activities for industry clients - both online and offline through road shows and events. The entertainment part comes in through the India's oldest television awards The Indian Telly Awards which Anil initiated way back in 2000. Additionally, the group also organizes The News Television Awards.

Anil has been Paris-based Reed Midem's India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh representative for some of the world's largest audiovisual content trade exhibitions - MIPTV, MIPCOM, MIPFormats, MIPDoc, MIPCancun,Midem and MIPChina. He represents the world's No 1 property market for the same markets, as well as Reed Exhibitions Asia Television Forum, Singapore.

A computer graduate started as a Game designer with few big gaming companies in India namely Indiagames, Games2win and Hungama before setting up my own venture called underDOGS! Over 13 years experience in gaming and developed over 200 games so far for clients across globe and self.

Strong expertise in Game Design, Production and Business, spearheading underDOGS for the last 9 years. Started single handedly, grew the company to around 15 people now with a strong brand presence by consistently creating quality products, helping the community and winning more than 9 awards. Also have a strong reach in the Indian Gaming community due to his digital presence, community building and regular content creation.

Abhishek is currently managing India’s largest network of gaming and esports influencers, Trinity Gaming. He is on his mission to make gaming as a viable career option for lakhs of Indians. As of today, Trinity Gaming has successfully executed over 30 campaigns during which they have managed to engage an average of at least a million people during every project.

Amit leads a team of young creative wizards on digital businesses which include gaming companies Zapak and Reliance Games and movie steaming service BigFlix.

Amit’s rich expertise in the digital space ranges across consumer marketing, sales and business development, partnerships, developer evangelism and product monetization. Over 25 year career he has been a successful business leader in the digital and mobile industry with the best brands and organizations’ like - Sun Microsystems, HP & IBM.

Prior to Reliance, Amit was Managing Director APAC and North America for Tira Wireless (a VC funded Startup). He has also worked in an executive position with Sun Microsystems where he managed Business Development for Java Micro Edition and Content Delivery Server product lines and led BD and marketing for 90 global operators to deliver new Java data services with 1.5 Billion Java handsets.

Sudhanshu Gupta is the COO of Paytm First Games and has been leading Paytm's gaming foray for the last 2 years. 

He has over 14 years of professional experience of which 10 of those he has spent in the biggest internet start-ups in India i.e. Flipkart and Paytm. During this time, he has launched and grown multiple products and businesses across e-commerce, payments and now content. Under his leadership, Paytm First Games has successfully emerged as one of the highest user-engagement platforms in the industry with a total user base of over 80 million.  

An alumnus of MDI Gurgaon and St. Stephen's College, Sudhanshu joined Paytm in 2013 as a part of the core team that developed the Paytm marketplace. Prior to this, he was working as Assistant Director for Computers category in Flipkart. 

Sudhanshu is accelerating the growth of the company and is focussed on making it the market leader of the Indian gaming industry.

Arvind Sivdas is a startup veteran, having launched his first startup just out of IIT Madras, back in 2005. He has successfully co-founded couple of companies previously, and more recently SuperCric and Kabaddi Adda. As an amateur triathlete and WaterPolo player he is passionate about the sports and gaming ecosystem.

His ikigai is to build strong teams with tight internal networks at the intersection of gaming, sports, data and technology. Arvind graduated from IIM Calcutta and went on to work at Mckinsey & Company. In another avatar, he has actively conducted sessions on entrepreneurship for young students

After working for about 4 years in the gaming industry as a game programmer, Himanshu quit his job and founded Xigma Games in 2015.

He was later joined by Govardhan Gosavi in 2016 and together they have developed and released four premium titles Super Nano Jumpers, Rubek, The Bonfire: Forsaken Lands, The Bonfire 2: Uncharted Shores on iOS, Android, and Steam. All the games were featured globally on the App Store and reached Top Charts globally during their release. The Bonfire series became one of the most successful IPs coming out of India in recent times and became highly critically acclaimed among critics and players.

Xigma Games is completely bootstrapped and is now a team of five passionate gamers with an aim to develop premier multiplatform titles and a mission to put India on the global map of Game Development.

The team has won multiple Awards & Recognition including:

• Super Nano Jumpers "Winner at The Very Big Indie Pitch, Pocket Gamer Connects" - Bangalore 2015.
• Super Nano Jumpers "Nominee in Casual Connect Indie Prize" San Francisco 2015
• Rubek "Best Mobile and Tablet Game, Puzzle[Indian], FICCI-BAF Awards 2017" Mumbai, 2017
• Rubek "Best of Apple App Store, India" Indian app store
• The Bonfire: Forsaken Lands "Nominee in Indie Prize Showcase, Casual Connect Asia" Singapore 2017
• The Bonfire: Forsaken Lands "Best Mobile and Tablet Game[National] FICCI BAF Awards 2018" Mumbai 2018
• The Bonfire: Forsaken Lands "Best Mobile and Tablet Game[International] FICCI BAF Awards 2018" Mumbai 2018
• The Bonfire: Forsaken Lands "IGDC Indie Game of the year 2018" Hyderabad 2018
• The Bonfire: Forsaken Lands " Google Play Best of 2019 winner for Best Indie 2019 " Google Play Store
• The Bonfire 2 Uncharted Shores "Winner The Big Indie Pitch #2 Mobile Edition" Pocket Gamer Connects, 2020
• The Bonfire 2 Uncharted Shores "Indie Game Area Official Selection" Tokyo Game Show, Tokyo 2019
• The Bonfire 2 Uncharted Shores "Indie Booth Arena Online Official Selection" Gamescom, 2020

Avichal graduated with a Masters Degree in Game Design and Project Management. Shortly after graduating he joined Zynga, where he worked on Farmville and Empires and Allies.

Since then he joined forces with Shruti and Ian, creating Nodding Heads Games. To date, Raji: An Ancient Epic has won numerous awards including Best Game Design at Dev Play 2019. Raji also went on to win Best of Show and Best Visuals.

Avichal graduated with a Masters Degree in Game Design and Project Management. Shortly after graduating he joined Zynga, where he worked on Farmville and Empires and Allies.

Since then he joined forces with Shruti and Ian, creating Nodding Heads Games. To date, Raji: An Ancient Epic has won numerous awards including Best Game Design at Dev Play 2019. Raji also went on to win Best of Show and Best Visuals.

Pawan Awasthi is responsible for the development and execution of the region’s strategic marketing plans for its consumer business at NVIDIA.

With 2 decades of experience in the technology industry, Pawan has deep expertise in working closely and strategically with a range of customers, fostering key partnerships with the ecosystem to accelerate the growth and adoption of Gaming in India.

Over the past two decades, Pawan has been the recipient of several awards. In 2016, 2017 and 2018 Pawan was honored as CMO of the year, by VAR India, Enterprise IT and other leading industry bodies.

Ishaan Arya is the cofounder, head of business development and content at The Esports Club. He is a veteran of the gaming industry. Ishaan started his career as a content creator and writer and led ‘Just Another Gaming Site’ JAGS- one of the top portals at the time. Under his leadership, JAGS became India’s first dedicated gaming YouTube and Livestream channels making Ishaan, India’s first live streamer. During the time he was at the helm of JAGS, he also wrote articles about gaming and technology for the Deccan Chronicle. After leaving JAGS, he worked with leading brands by assisting them with consumer engagement, digital content, and eventually, online and offline gaming and e-sports campaigns.

Rajan Navani is the Vice Chairman & Managing Director of JetSynthesys, a new age digital entertainment and technology company with a portfolio of world class products, platforms, and services, aiming to touch the digital lives of billions of consumers in India and around the globe. Under his leadership and strategic direction, JetSynthesys has built diversified business divisions spanning across gaming, wellness, fintech, music, digital & social entertainment, currently serving millions of users globally and 100+ clients worldwide by harnessing advanced capabilities in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, blockchain and AR/VR. Rajan is currently the Chairman of the Confederation of Indian Industry’s CII National Council on Future Businesses, Chairman of the CII Council on India@75, the Past National Chairman of the CII Young Indian. Rajan is a founding trustee of the India@75 Foundation, through which he is working with multiple stakeholders, including government, corporates and civil society in helping build a Dream India by 2022, seventy-five years since its independence. He is a global board member of the US-India Business Council (USIBC) and a member of the Purdue-India Executive Council. He is the first National President of the recently constituted Indian Digital Gaming Society and is also a trustee of Aspen’s Ananta Centre in India, a fellow of the Aspen India Leadership Initiative 2011–2012 and member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network, the world’s foremost group on values-based leadership across all walks of life. He is also a BMW Herbert Quandt Foundation’s Young World Leader. Rajan is also playing an active role in helping shape the government and business US-India partnership and is a member of the Singapore-India and Israel-India Track II strategic dialogues. He is a Government of India nominated CEO of the India Japan Business Leaders Forum, member of the India Sweden Business Leaders Forum and is a board member of Indiaspora, a powerful network linking the Indian American Diaspora with India.

Rajan holds a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA, under a NASA grant, majoring in Digital Satellite Imaging and Remote Sensing graduating with the award for outstanding academic achievement. A gold medallist at the University of Poona, India in the Bachelors of Electronics and Telecommunications program from College of Engineering Pune (COEP), Rajan also has a diploma in Business Management.

Manish Agarwal (44), CEO at Nazara Technologies Ltd. is an IIM A alumnus who is passionate about building and scaling consumer internet products for Indians especially in the media and entertainment space with over 20 years of experience across Unilever, Microsoft, rediff.com, UTV and Reliance Entertainment. Currently he is busy building and establishing Nazara as India’s first and largest Gaming and Sports Media Company.

Anushree is a Marketer with varied experiences in managing and thinking about brands both as a brand owner and a strategic planner. Have amassed great learnings along the way in creating, managing and re-imagining brands across traditional and digital spaces. Have nurtured keen interest in the start up space, e commerce and technology.

Mukta Aphale leads Devops and Reliability Engineering at MPL - India’s largest esports and mobile gaming platform. Prior to MPL, Mukta has worked with various companies ranging from startups to MNCs. She has also been an entrepreneur with her startup Crevise, which was acquired by MPL. Mukta comes with rich experience working with complex development projects, public cloud, Devops, SRE, containers/Docker, monitoring, alerting, analytics, data engineering and artificial intelligence.

A marketing veteran, Piyush Kumar is the founder and CEO of Rooter, India's biggest sports community platform that is personalizing sports content and giving voice to millions of fans across sports and gaming. In his present capacity, he spearheads the business growth and partnerships.

A Computer Graduate from Delhi University, Piyushbuilt his professional career across 13 years with prominent brands like FCB Ulka, Dish TV and Swatch Group before finally taking the entrepreneurial leap with Rooter Sports Technologies Pvt Ltd. The platform has successfully engaged more than 5 million sports fans so far with the efforts of its 30-member strong team. He now plans to establish the company as India’s biggest sports content platform. Having created an employee-focused company,

Piyush attributes its entire achievement to them.

Besides his entrepreneurial endeavours, there is also a philanthropic side to Piyush. He voluntarily sponsors the education of girls and wants to make a long term difference in future. He is an active sports player and is also very active on Twitter as write to Piyush.

A veteran of the gaming industry across console, PC and mobile, Sharan has helped game developers build strategies for global success. At Google Play he works closely with indies as well as market leaders across Australia, NZ and India to help bring their fantastic experiences to gamers

A highly accomplished professional with over 2 decades of extensive experience in Business Management, Media, Marketing, Digital, Content and Team Building. Currently Vinit is the Business Head of GroupM’s Entertainment, Sports and Live practice.

With expertise in formulating & directing strategies to promote products and services; steering marketing investment towards delivering business results for clients based on valuation and ROI, Vinit have played a pivotal role in the growth of sports and entertainment business in India. Before joining GroupM, Vinit worked with The Times of India Group, Mudra Communications and Padmalaya Telefilms. Over the years with multiple assignments that he has handled, Vinit’s primary focus has always been around studying and understanding audience behaviour in the ever evolving popular culture of entertainment and sports. From media sales to media planning, movie production, marketing and distribution to sports marketing and live entertainment, Vinit has dabbled and overtime delivered on various business challenges.

In 2014, Vinit initiated a pioneering initiative, a first of its kind and a very definitive report on sports sponsorship in India titled ‘Sporting Nation in The Making’ and in 2017 ‘Showbiz’ a similar report on movie marketing. Vinit has also co-authored and published a white paper in association with one of the premium academic institutes ‘Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad’ on ‘What Spells Success for Indian Leagues’.

As an industry leader, Vinit represents GroupM in various industry bodies enabling and influencing key policy changes.

A postgraduate in Management from North Maharashtra University and currently based in Mumbai, B. Krishna Rao has more than 20 years of work experience in the FMCG sector across several leading companies such as Parle Products, Uncle Chipps, Maxwell Apparels and Excelcia Foods. Over the years, Krishna has also grown to become one of the key opinion leaders within the industry on several aspects such as manufacturing, distribution, sales, marketing, advertising and branding to name a few.

In his current role as Senior Category Head, Krishna is responsible for Parle’s entire Snacks, Confectionery, Cakes and Rusk portfolio. Krishna works closely across teams within the company to drive need gap identification and new product launches, pricing and profitability, advertising and media management, building brand equity and imagery and budget management.

In the 18 years that Krishna has spent at Parle, some of his landmark achievements include launch of Parle’s snacking portfolio comprising brands like Parle’s Wafers, Chatkeens, FullToss and Mexitos, launch of Parle’s Kachha Mango Bite to be the leading candy brand in the category and launch of Magix cream biscuits to be a market leader within a span of three years of its introduction.

A strong believer in work-life balance, Krishna enjoys playing word games, reading, watching Bollywood movies and listening to retro music in his downtime.

Shiva Nandy is an Indian gamer, Entrepreneur popularly known for Skyesports, a esports tournament organization. Skyesports founded in November 2018, has become one of the sought out esports organization in India after it rose to fame by conducting various esports tournaments in India and the popularity was seen across India. Major esports event in India like Skyesports Championship, Skyesports Grandslam, PGAX 2019, IIT Madras Championship etc were created.

Rahul is currently leading the backend development at WinZO. He is driving the company's vision by bridging the gap between business and technology at WinZO by identifying best technical solutions. Rahul is an IIT Kharagpur alumnus, earlier a part of tech giants such as OYO and Amazon. He is a passionate developer with a knack for diving deep into tech. and solving problems at a scale.

Sanupam is the Co-founder & Creative Director of Playtonia Esports Pvt Ltd. He comes from animation & film making background and has 8 years of work experience and has worked for companies like Techzone (An EROS International company) and Sulekha. His love for sports, animation, design, and gaming led him to start Playtonia. He has learned a lot as an entrepreneur than he could have been in a job and that’s the beauty of entrepreneurship. He has done significantly well within a short span of time at Playtonia and with his strong team of passionate people and they are well poised to scale new highs.

Coming from the city of Guwahati in Assam, Animesh Agarwal is a result oriented Mobile Gaming Athlete, carrying his gaming profession along with his education. On this note, he is a CA Finalist, a CFA Level 2 candidate & an FRM part 2 candidate. When it comes to gaming, he primarily plays on mobile, but regularly plays PC & console gamnes. He is one of the acknowledged pioneers of mobile gaming in India, and believer of enthusiastic & energetic audience engagement on the base of action packed game play. From representing India in PMSC Global finals in 2018, to introducing concepts like boot camp for players, establishing a gaming house in Mumbai, Animesh takes his mobile gaming career seriously, and generates proven results. In a first in India, he established two of the biggest names in mobile gaming today - Team 8Bit & Team Soul.

Shagufta 'Xyaa' Iqbal is one of the first mainstream 'female' gamers of India, breaking several stereotypes of race, gender, and profession to carve her name in the massive Indian Gaming community. Her charisma on camera, her style of content creation, and her genuine love towards gaming has made her feature consistently amongst the top 3 female gaming influencers in India. She's also one of those few gamers who maintains a near equal PC & Mobile gaming audience base, giving the audience a plethora of content to engage with. Xyaa loves to experiment with new gaming titles - she's seen trying a new title every week, but holds a personal fandom towards Valorant, CoD Warzone, Dark souls & Fall guys. Apart from working with various gaming, tech & content brands such as Netflix, MSI, HP, Lenovo, etc. she is currently the face of the streamer program for top global brands such as Intel & LogitechG, and popular homegrown brands such as LOCO. Xyaa holds a loyal fan base of over 230,000 on Youtube, and over 100,000 on Instagram.

an ace game designer in the national circuit, mentor, and educator of repute, having around 15+ years of experience, has embarked with an ambitious venture for bringing gaming projects by indie developers from India with the dream to create titans for the international arena. Linkedin: View Profile