Umesh Sachdev

Co-founder and CEO

Umesh Sachdev, Co-founder, and CEO of Uniphore, is a modern-day entrepreneur with a passion for technologies that have massive societal impact. Umesh co-founded Uniphore with Ravi Saraogi to bridge the communication gap between man and machine using voice and speech.

Umesh was globally recognized in 2016 as one of the ten ‘Next Generation Leaders’ by Time Magazine. The MIT Tech Review recognized him as one of the ‘Innovators Under 35’. He has been conferred with the title of ‘Innovative Entrepreneur’ by the Ministry of Science and Technology’s Technopreneur Promotion Programme (TePP). Umesh holds patents in Speech Recognition Technologies and Voice Biometrics and is the author of many technical papers.

Umesh is an alumnus of Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, and also a renowned ‘TED Talk’ speaker.

Annie Weckesser

CMO + People

As chief marketing and people officer, Annie leads all aspects of Uniphore’s global marketing and communications, as well as, talent strategy and management. Prior to joining Uniphore, Annie was part of the leadership team at NIO, a next generation car company, leading US communications from startup through IPO. Previously, Annie held various strategic communications and marketing roles for the global technology giant Cisco for nine years. Throughout her career, she has counselled and partnered with some of the world’s most senior corporate and government leaders and their teams.

Ravi Saraogi

Co-founder and President APAC

Ravi, Co-founder & President-APAC, leads Sales, Delivery and Customer Success for Uniphore. His passion for mobile learning applications and technologies found traction when Uniphore was founded. Ravi and Umesh envisioned building solutions that give more power to human speech.

He has vast experience in directing technology teams in initiatives spanning mobile theft security, wireless network development, and mobile learning applications. Ravi is currently an active member of the Mobile Payment Forum of India (MPFI), where he identifies and develops business opportunities in the field of mobile payments. He is known for his excellent analytic skills, dexterity in problem resolution, and proclivity for driving operational excellence. Ravi is an alumnus of Jaypee Institute of Information Technology.

Karen Smith

CRO, North America and Europe

Karen Smith is Chief Revenue Officer, North America and Europe, at Uniphore. Bringing nearly 25 years of experience to this role, Karen is responsible for scaling the worldwide sales organization to support the company’s growth initiatives.

Prior to Uniphore, Karen served as VP of Worldwide Sales at Directly, Inc. a CX Automation AI platform provider, where she was responsible for rapid growth of enterprise customers. Karen has held positions as VP of Sales/US and Asia at TTech, Head of US Sales at Convergys and VP of Sales at Genesys. Karen has dedicated her career to developing sales teams focused on customer experience, contact center technology and artificial intelligence.

Throughout her career she has mentored rising sales professionals and is an outspoken advocate of women in leadership. Karen currently resides in San Francisco with her husband, Steve.

Moni Manor

Chief Product Officer

Moni Manor is Chief Product Officer at Uniphore, bringing over 25 years of experience with CRM, UC, CC and AI into this role. Moni is responsible for developing the product strategy and driving the product evolution and delivery at Uniphore.

Prior to Uniphore, Moni was the Chief Product Officer at New Voice Media, where he transformed the product strategy, and helped scale the portfolio till company’s acquisition by Vonage. Prior to that Moni held positions as CTO and EVP of Products at Five9, and several senior product development leadership positions at Avaya and Amdocs.

Moni is a firm believer that time is a resource that companies in high-growth mode cannot afford to waste. With that in mind, he focuses on building and motivating strong teams that make a difference. Moni resides in Mountain View, CA.

Santosh Iyer

Chief Business Officer

As Chief Business Officer, Santosh leads all aspects of Uniphore’s GTM and Sales Strategy, Revenue Operations, Sales Development, Industry Solutions, Business Value Consulting and Customer Advisory Board functions.

Santosh brings a unique blend of strategy, business operations and P/L expertise through his 22 years of global experience with premier consulting firms like Pricewaterhouse Coopers and Infosys Consulting, software industry leaders like Qlik and hypergrowth unicorns like DataRobot.
During his role as a consultant, he has advised tech industry giants like Google, Adobe, Autodesk, Computer Associates, Symantec, NetApp, etc., in areas of growth strategy, sales and GTM transformation, revenue operations, business scaling & EBITDA improvement.

Most recently, he led global GTM and sales strategy at DataRobot, the Auto ML/AI category creator and # 6 company in the Forbes Top AI 50 list. Working for the Office of the CEO, he played a key role in driving their triple digit growth trajectory and unicorn valuation.
Santosh holds a BS in Engineering from the University of Bombay and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management. He lives in Silicon Valley with his wife, daughter and German Shepherd dog.

Stephane Berthier

Chief Financial Officer

Stephane Berthier is Chief Financial Officer at Uniphore. He brings over 30 years of accounting and finance experience. As CFO, he leads the accounting, finance business support, financial planning and analysis, investors relations and tax functions at Uniphore.

Stephane has worked in Europe and the United States where he has garnered extensive knowledge of both domestic and international finance, SaaS businesses and international operations. He was a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers for over twenty years prior to joining Uniphore.

Stephane lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, and he has earned his Master’s degree in finance and accounting from the University of Jean Moulin, Lyon, France.

Jafar H Syed

Sr. Vice President and Chief Growth Officer

As Chief Growth officer, Jafar leads growth initiatives for Uniphore including partnerships and alliances.

Prior to Uniphore, Jafar led the Global BPO’s CX business at NTT Data. Previously, he led Dell Services’ European and Australian BPO business based in Peterborough, UK. Jafar has over 20 years of experience in CX and Contact Centers. He has held senior leadership positions for companies such as NTT Data, Dell, IBM, GE and VFS. He has led large teams in Sales, Practice, Operations, Vendor Management and Solution Design.

Jafar has lived and worked in the US, UK, Dubai, Philippines, China and India. He is an ardent lover of history and spends much of his spare time reading and traveling.

Curt‌ ‌Hill‌‌

Sr. Vice President - Services & CCO

Curt Hill is SVP, Services & CCO at Uniphore. Curt has 26+ years at Cisco Systems, having developed advanced technology solutions, simplified complex top-level business issues, strengthened stakeholder alliances, as well as having built collaborative cross-functional teams. He is a strong customer advocate, strategist, growth driver, and change agent. In addition, he is adept at anticipating problems, averting crisis situations, and implementing creative solutions to resolve issues and exceed customer expectations.

More than just a team player at the office, he is an active participant in inclusion and collaboration in the industry. He is a member of the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) Workforce Alliance program and has previously provided job shadowing opportunities through the Cisco Connected Women program.

Curt earned his Master’s in Computer Science and a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration from the University of Phoenix. He is also a Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert and a member of SSPA, TSIA and Field Services.

Samith Ramachandran

Sr. Vice President and Head of Technology

Samith Ramachandran is responsible for overall Technology Strategy and Execution at Uniphore, including Product Engineering, and Core Tech R&D.

Samith comes with over 22 years of rich and diverse experience in Software Product Engineering and Service Delivery. Prior to Uniphore, he has worked with Siemens (now Nokia Solutions), Subex and Flytxt primarily in Software Product Engineering roles.

Samith holds a degree in Computer Science & Engineering from the University of Kerala. Bred in Telecoms Tech, Big Data Analytics and ML, he found his passion for Conversational AI and Speech Tech at Uniphore. He is also an avid foodie and gourmet at heart and loves to explore-cook-eat-write world cuisine.

Sylvain Tremblay

Sr. Vice President - Video AI Business

Sylvain Tremblay is Senior Vice President of Video AI Business at Uniphore. He comes with a rich experience of around 12 years at Cisco Systems. Sylvain brings a wealth of knowledge across all facets of the customer lifecycle. In his most recent position as Vice-President, Global Virtual Sales and Engineering (GVSE), he led the organization through several strategic transitions to accelerate growth at scale.

Sylvain has been at the forefront of digitizing the customer acquisitions process and introducing AI and analytics-based sales motion. Prior to GVSE Americas, Sylvain held multiple leadership roles in Commercial Sales, Global Enterprise Sales, Marketing, Strategy, and Planning.

Sylvain holds an engineering degree from the Université de Sherbrooke and Postgraduate coursework from McGill University’s International Business program and UCLA. Originally from Quebec, Canada, Sylvain now resides in Nashville with his wife, Marie-Joe, and their two children, Julien and Chloe.

Stuart Ferguson

Vice President – Sales (North America)

Stuart Ferguson leads North America sales at Uniphore. With over 25 years of sales experience, Stuart is an expert in enterprise customers conduct and commerce.

Most recently, Stuart worked with Directly software, a San Francisco based startup, selling an AI technology platform. As part of the founding sales organization, he lead the sales growth of the company and added customer logos of Microsoft, Samsung, SAP, and Intuit to mention a few. Stuart’s prior experience has spanned the Customer Experience space taking on sales roles at Cisco, Avaya, and Genesys.

Outside of work, Stuart prioritizes spending time with his family & friends, and enjoys traveling, entertaining, and snow skiing.

Jenny Vanta

Vice President – Corporate Controller

Jenny Vanta is Vice President, Corporate Controller at Uniphore. Jenny has 20 years of comprehensive experience in finance and accounting. She is a CPA in California and in the Philippines, where she began her career at Ernst & Young. She moved to California in 2005 to join the public accounting firm of Grant Thornton as an auditor and developed technical accounting skills, including financial reporting and SOX compliance. In 2014, Jenny joined Lithium Technologies, Inc. and expanded her expertise in worldwide corporate accounting operations and cross-functional project management/systems implementations.

Jenny is a strategic, results-oriented, and hands-on leader. She is passionate about mentoring and developing best in class accounting team and creating scalable finance processes in a fast-paced environment. She lives in the Bay Area with her husband, two kids, and an extended family of 6 mixed breed mini pinschers & chihuahuas.

Subhash Kothuru

Vice President – Product Management

Subhash is responsible for Product Management at Uniphore. He is a technology executive with 20+ years experience in developing and executing business and product strategy; building scalable global teams; developing and optimizing organizational processes and infrastructure. Prior to Uniphore, Subhash led product management for the mid-market contact center and Workforce Optimization portfolio at Avaya; was part of the core management team at KnoahSoft, Inc. leading it from a bootstrap startup to a profitable entity and a successful acquisition by Avaya.

Subhash has an MBA from University of Michigan – Stephen M. Ross School of Business, a Masters in Information Systems and Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering. Subhash enjoys the outdoors and loves to cook in his free time

K G Priya

Vice President – Global Delivery and Services

K G Priya is Vice President – Global Delivery and Services at Uniphore. She is responsible for delivery and services function across the globe. She comes with over 15 years of rich experience in the domains of Delivery Management, Presales operations, Product Management and Business Consulting, cutting across BFSI, Finance, Manufacturing, Logistics, & Aviation segments. Priya has immense expertise in spearheading Delivery and Presales operations for regions across the globe having effectively managed multiple global teams. She comes with a strong analytics background and her immense knowledge has helped enterprise clients transform the way they operate based on her insight.
 
In her previous assignment, Priya was with Ramco Systems where she was the Global Presales head for Enterprise Analytics and BFSI vertical and was also involved in the conceptualization of multiple products.  Prior to that she was with ICICI Bank and IDBI Bank taking care of Compliance and Bank Operations. Priya holds a Master’s degree in Business Administration and Bachelor’s degree in Technology.

Whenever she finds time from her busy schedule, Priya likes spending the time with her kids, traveling, running marathons and reading extensively. She is also actively involved as a mentor and coach for women professionals.

Hai Vo

Vice President of Sales Engineering

Hai Vo is the Vice President of Sales Engineering at Uniphore. A seasoned customer service practitioner, Hai has over 20 years of experience advising clients on developing strategies and roadmaps on their contact center infrastructure and customer experience transformation. Prior to joining Uniphore, he served as the cloud practice lead for the west region of Presidio and was the Director of the Customer Experience practice for Dimension Data.

Hai received his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Arizona and in his free time outside of work he enjoys attending his two children’s sports activities and traveling with his family.

Anurag Verma

Vice President, Human Resources

Anurag a people and business oriented HR professional brings over 24 years of experience to his role at Uniphore. He has worked in start-ups and fast paced organizations where he played a critical role in building/ transforming the organizations and scaling the people function. He brings rich and diverse experience in building culture, managing change, organisation development, and talent management. He is passionate about coaching people and building diverse and inclusive workplaces. Anurag is alumnus of UIM and Christ Church Jabalpur and an associate power coach.

Most recently, Anurag worked with Flipkart, India’s largest online marketplace. Prior to Flipkart, he has held leadership roles in people function with Ascend Telecom Infrastructure, Bharti Airtel, Visisht and Maharishi group.

Outside of work, Anurag likes spending time with his family & friends, enjoys traveling, watching movies and cricket. He is an avid supporter of bringing in change in education and in his free time likes to associate himself with students and academic institutions.

Gokulakrishnan T G

Vice President - Sales

Gokulakrishnan leads Sales at Uniphore for India, Middle East and South Asia. Gokul brings over 20 years of experience across sales, technology and product engineering to his role at Uniphore. Prior to Uniphore, he was with Servion Global Solutions as the Chief Business Officer running the North American and Europe Business. Previously, he was associated with Nexge Technologies and HCL. Outside of work, Gokul enjoys spending time with his family and friends and is an avid cricket fan.

Prashant Rao Murari

Vice President – Delivery Services (JAPAC)

Prashant Rao Murari is Vice President – Delivery Services (JAPAC) at Uniphore. He is responsible for Professional Services and Customer Success function in the region. He brings with him a vast experience of 20 years leading global business functions for product companies at scale. He has actively managed enterprise customers as a SaaS delivery and Customer Success leader. He has been a part of global leadership teams making meaningful impact on execution, business strategy, GTM, organization capability development and support functions.

In his last role, he was the India site head for a leading Bay Area legal technology firm and prior to that he was associated with Metricstream as part of their global leadership team for Professional Services and Customer Success functions. He was also associated with Microsoft, Intel and Supervalu/ANSR Consulting in various capacities.

In his spare time, Prashant likes spending time with family, traveling, cooking and reading books on technology and business. He is also an active member of start-up ecosystem in India in his personal capacity as a mentor and advisor.

Vijai Shankar

Vice President – Product Marketing

Vijai Shankar is Vice President of Product Marketing at Uniphore. Prior to this, he was the Head of Product Marketing at Xactly Corporation. Vijai brings with him a rich experience of over 15 years in Product Marketing across multiple domains, including over 10 years in the contact center industry.
Before Xactly, he held senior product marketing roles at companies like [24]7.ai, Kony, Genesys and VeriSign. Vijai firmly believes that customer experience is more relevant today than ever.
In his spare time, Vijai loves traveling with his wife and two sons. He also likes exploring new cuisines, spending time with family, playing & watching NFL and coaching his two boys’ little league baseball teams. Vijai is a self-proclaimed wine connoisseur.

Patrick Ehlen

Vice President – Artificial Intelligence

Patrick Ehlen is Vice President of Artificial Intelligence at Uniphore. He brings over 20 years of professional experience in speech and language technologies, most recently as Chief Scientist at Loop AI Labs. Patrick began his pursuit of Artificial Intelligence in 3rd grade, after reading Arthur C. Clarke’s novel 2001: A Space Odyssey. In 1992, inspired by the Parallel Distributed Processing volumes, he trained his first neural network to learn distributed representations of concepts.

Patrick earned a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the New School for Social Research, and was awarded the Dissertation Fellowship, the Alfred J. Marrow Memorial Award in Psychology, and the Charles Cannell award for his work on mathematical modeling of human concept processing. While completing the PhD, he interned at speech recognition pioneer Dragon Systems and then at AT&T Labs, trailblazing innovations in speech and multimodal understanding technology. 

Having been awarded eleven U.S. patents he has produced over 50 research publications in the areas of computational semantics, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, word sense disambiguation, human concept learning, and Artificial Intelligence. His work is cited in over 700 scientific papers. He served on the Advisory Board for Digility, a conference and expo on digital reality, and also for The Flight Exchange, a charter aircraft booking platform company.

Erik Johnson

Vice President - Product Management

Erik Johnson is Vice President, Product Management at Uniphore. Erik has developed and led Product at leading Silicon Valley companies with over 20 years of experience in the software and communications industry. Prior to joining Uniphore, Erik was Sr Director, Product Management at Vonage where he led the evolution of the Contact Center product and the Product Management team. Before Vonage, Erik was a Product Management leader at Palantir where he built products to accelerate the time to market for Palantir’s analytic applications.

Erik also led Avaya’s Product Management team and the Automation Product portfolio centered around inbound and outbound customer experience for contact centers. Erik started his career in Software Development and Architecture building award-winning IVR and speech application tooling and holds 3 patents for his work in communications innovation.
In his spare time, Erik enjoys cycling, skiing, cooking, traveling, photography and spending time with family and friends.

Stephen Drew

Vice President - Professional Services

Stephen Drew is Vice President of Professional Services at Uniphore. He brings over 20 years of professional experience designing, deploying, and supporting contact center and customer service technologies, most recently as Vice President of Contact Center Solutions for Carousel.

Prior to Carousel, Stephen was the Senior Director of Global Contact Center Technologies for Cigna Healthcare and was a Vice President at eLoyalty leading strategic engagements. Stephen is also an adjunct faculty member at DePaul University where he teaches Innovation & Technology and is a member of George Washington University’s Customer Experience Advisory Board.

Stephen holds an MS in Finance from the University of Notre Dame and is pursuing his Doctorate in Business Administration at DePaul University.

Saurabh Saxena

Vice President – Engineering

Saurabh is the Head of Engineering & Technology at Uniphore. An unabashed technologist, he has spent 20+ years building Enterprise software products in the CRM, IOT, Machine Learning, NLP and Big Data spaces.

Prior to Uniphore, Saurabh was the Founder & CTO of Tribyl, an NLP-powered CRM SaaS application where he built AI technology on unstructured data like emails and phone calls. In his prior role he was the founding Head of Product & Engineering at a hyper-volume IoT & ML platform startup that processed hundreds of billions of transactions for predictive analytics.

Previously, Saurabh was the Chief Architect at eMeter, a Sequoia- backed startup where he built a real time IoT gateway and data processing platform (exit: Siemens). Earlier in his career, Saurabh was the Chief Architect at Amdocs-Clarify, building CRM products, OSS/BSS software, and the first ever WAP based mobile app store.

Saurabh earned his Master’s in Business from KGSM, Milwaukee, WI, a B.E in Computer Science from BIT India, and is a selected member of the Forbes Technology Council.

Francesco Crippa

Vice President - Platform Engineering

Francesco leads the newly formed Platform Engineering team at Uniphore. He has more than 20 years of experience in leading reliable and real time platforms at extreme scale.

Prior to Uniphore, Francesco led the overall Engineering organization at Rollbar as VP of Engineering, delivering a world class observability SaaS platform that automatically classifies application stack-traces and logs through the usage of ML and AI.

He also ran the Core Shopping team at Zillow and he was one of the founding members of Project Square, a Cisco WebEx initiative defined to completely transform the foundations of the collaboration space. He built from the ground up the teams that delivered the desktop, web and developer experiences of one of the biggest collaboration platforms in the world.

Before working with large public companies, he co-founded a successful startup in the field of Enterprise tech consultancy in Italy, delivering services across Europe and Middle-East for clients like EMC, Banca d’Italia, Leroy Merlin and Vodafone.

In his spare time Francesco enjoys Philosophy, Music, Synthesizers and Art, where he likes to build light installations based on programmable LEDs and microcontrollers.

John T. Chambers

Board Member

John Chambers is the founder and CEO of JC2 Ventures, a purpose-driven venture capital firm focused on enabling startups from around the world to build and scale. In his role, Chambers uses his decades of experience disrupting the technology industry to invest in and coach companies that are leading the next market transitions.

Prior to founding JC2 Ventures in 2018, Chambers served as CEO, Chairman and Executive Chairman of Cisco. During his 25+ years with Cisco, he helped grow the company from $70 million when he joined in 1991, to $1.2 billion when he became CEO in 1995, to $47 billion when he stepped down as CEO in 2015.

Andrea Ayers

Board Member

Andrea J. Ayers is the former President and Chief Executive Officer of Convergys Corporation, and has been a director of the Company since December 2014. She had a significant role in the transformation of Convergys from a company with three business lines to a customer management solutions company with approximately 125,000 employees worldwide.

Her expertise in multi-channel customer experience, customer management analytics and technology will be extremely valuable for Uniphore.

Burt Podbere

Board Member

Burt Podbere serves as the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) for CrowdStrike. Since joining the company, Podbere has been instrumental in establishing the company’s long-term financial management strategy and developing the company’s global expansion strategy.

During his five plus year tenure at CrowdStrike he has help secure approximately $1B in equity financing through several funding rounds including its 2019 IPO as well as approximately $1.5B in secured and unsecured debt.

Podbere has worked in Canada, Europe, and the U.S. where he has garnered extensive knowledge of both domestic and international finance, SaaS businesses, and international operations.

Umesh Sachdev

Co-founder and CEO

Umesh Sachdev, Co-founder, and CEO of Uniphore, is a modern-day entrepreneur with a passion for technologies that have massive societal impact. Umesh co-founded Uniphore with Ravi Saraogi to bridge the communication gap between man and machine using voice and speech.

Umesh was globally recognized in 2016 as one of the ten ‘Next Generation Leaders’ by Time Magazine. The MIT Tech Review recognized him as one of the ‘Innovators Under 35’. He has been conferred with the title of ‘Innovative Entrepreneur’ by the Ministry of Science and Technology’s Technopreneur Promotion Programme (TePP). Umesh holds patents in Speech Recognition Technologies and Voice Biometrics and is the author of many technical papers.

Umesh is an alumnus of Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, and also a renowned ‘TED Talk’ speaker.

Rob Rueckert

Board Member

Rob Rueckert joined Sorenson Capital in 2015 and leads the firm’s growth-stage technology practice. He co-founded Sorenson Ventures in 2017 where he invests in software and security. Influenced by his engineering background, Rob is a “product-first” investor, focusing on product leadership, technical depth, and differentiating quality – a winning formula for innovation and growth. Rob enjoys working closely with ambitious leaders and is equally devoted to both solving their challenges and celebrating their accomplishments.

Prior to joining Sorenson Capital, Rob spent 15 years in Silicon Valley at Intel Capital, where he invested in over 50 companies worldwide and across multiple technology sectors, including enterprise software, cloud computing, data platforms, security, communications, consumer internet, and consumer devices. Rob managed and oversaw more than 25 successful exits from his portfolio, including four IPOs and acquisitions by Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Samsung, Cisco, and many others.

Additional past positions include software and data engineer / consultant for Arthur Andersen and executive roles for a number of other companies. Rob holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth and a Bachelor of Science in information systems from Brigham Young University. He is a Kauffman Fellow.

Ranjith Menon

Board Member

Ranjith Menon is Executive Director at Chiratae Ventures India Advisors. He has been in the industry since 2000 and in the venture investment advisory since 2007.

Prior to Chiratae Ventures, Ranjith worked with Cyient (earlier Infotech Enterprises), India’s premier Design Engineering and GIS Company. As Manager-Marketing he played a key role in conceptualizing and launching new service offerings for the Aerospace vertical, which is one of the largest offshore Aerospace practices out of India. Earlier in his career, Ranjith has served as a stress test engineer at Infotech Enterprises and also gained shop floor experience at Bharat Earth Movers Limited, India’s largest earth moving equipment manufacturers.

Ranjith is a Charter Member of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE). He holds a Bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from Bangalore University and an MBA from the Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai.

Ravi Saraogi

Co-founder and President APAC

Ravi, Co-founder & President-APAC, leads Sales, Delivery and Customer Success for Uniphore. His passion for mobile learning applications and technologies found traction when Uniphore was founded. Ravi and Umesh envisioned building solutions that give more power to human speech.

He has vast experience in directing technology teams in initiatives spanning mobile theft security, wireless network development, and mobile learning applications. Ravi is currently an active member of the Mobile Payment Forum of India (MPFI), where he identifies and develops business opportunities in the field of mobile payments. He is known for his excellent analytic skills, dexterity in problem resolution, and proclivity for driving operational excellence. Ravi is an alumnus of Jaypee Institute of Information Technology.

Sumant Mandal

Board Member

Sumant is Managing Director and co-founder of LA-based March Capital Partners, in addition to being co-founder of two leading technology incubators in the San Francisco Bay Area; The Hive, focused on AI and Blockchain driven companies, and The Fabric, focused on cloud, IoT and network infrastructure companies. He has been part of incubating more than 25 companies. Sumant leads investments in Cloud Computing, IoT, AI/ML, and Network Infrastructure as well as companies supporting the Indian market. He currently serves on the boards of numerous market-leading companies, including Astound, BillDesk, The Rubicon Project, CarTrade, IoTium, KMesh, SparkCognition, Decision Engines, and Xage Security.

In his nearly two decades of venture capital, Sumant has generated multiple meaningful exits in companies he has either incubated or been the first institutional investor. His exits include Velocloud Networks (acquired by VMWare), Perspica Systems (acquired by Cisco), The Rubicon Project (NYSE: RUBI), Kosei (acquired by Pinterest), Appcito (acquired by A10 Networks), Deep Forest Media (acquired by Rakuten), Kazeon Systems (acquired by EMC), Mimosa Systems (acquired by Iron Mountain), Ankeena Networks (acquired by Juniper), Cetas (acquired by VMware), and Apture (acquired by Google).

In 2000, Sumant joined Clearstone Venture Partners, where he went on to become a Managing Director four years later. Prior to Clearstone, Sumant spent more than eight years as an entrepreneur, starting companies in both India and the United States.

Sumant has an M.B.A. from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Michigan State University. He is a Charter Member of TiE.

Pradeep Tagare

Board Member

Pradeep Tagare manages National Grid Partners’ $250M enterprise and energy-focused corporate venture fund based in Silicon Valley. The fund has invested in 20 startups including 3 early-stage VC Funds in the UK, Israel and the US.

Pradeep joined National Grid Partners from Intel Capital where he worked for over 13 years in Silicon Valley and India. At Intel Capital, Pradeep led 16 investments which resulted in 2 IPOs and 8 M&A exits with 2 Unicorns and 1 Decacorn in the portfolio.

Prior to Intel Capital, Pradeep spent over 12 years in Silicon Valley in technology/product marketing roles at startups such as Inference, BroadVision, Healthon, and as an entrepreneur starting Yopa, a mobile middleware software company (acquired by XDrive/AOL). Pradeep has an M.S.E.E from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a BE (EE) from the University of Bombay, and is a Kauffman Fellow.

Pankaj Patel

Board Member

Pankaj Patel was Executive Vice President and Chief Development Officer at Cisco Systems, Inc. where he reported to the CEO as the Engineering head of the company’s $38 billion product and solution portfolio. He drove the business and technology strategy across Cisco’s Routing, Switching, Wireless, Security, Mobility, Video, Collaboration, Data Center and Cloud offerings delivered by a global team of over 26,000 engineers.

Mr. Patel is a proven results-oriented and seasoned technology leader with 25+ years of experience developing highly scalable products and services by building and leading large, high-performance global engineering organizations, setting clear vision, directing strategy and delivering against goals. He is passionate about translating strategy to execution, and delivering the best experience for the customer.

Mr. Patel retired from Cisco in October of 2016 and now serves on the Board of Directors of several startups. He is focused on incubating, investing, and advising startups with their strategy, product development, and go-to-market as well as helping them scale. Patel is also a mentor and sponsor to numerous employees throughout the industry.

Sumit Jain

Observer

Sumit is Senior Partner at Sistema Asia Capital (SA Cap) Advisory based out of Bangalore and advises SA Cap investments in the space of enterprise software, healthcare, education, AI/data analytics, AR/VR, IOT and consumer tech.

Sumit brings nearly 15 years of operational, advisory and investment experience to his role. Prior to SA Cap Advisory Sumit served on the boards of 15+ portfolio companies as primary board member or observer including AI startups such as Edge Networks, Embibe and Vernacular.ai. While at Kalaari, he played a key role in sourcing and executing 7 investments across 2 funds and supported 3 exits from the portfolio. Earlier, while at HSBC, Sumit advised multiple clients on cross-border and domestic M&As and JVs and was associated with capital markets and leveraged buyout transactions in his role as an Associate with the Investment Banking division. He started his career at BG Group India as a Business Analyst and worked across group companies in telecom, E&P and gas distribution.

Sumit holds an engineering degree from IIT Kharagpur and an MBA from IIM Calcutta.

John T. Chambers

Chief Guru

John Chambers founded JC2 Ventures to help disruptive startups from around the world innovate and scale. Chambers believes in the development of startup nations and hence, invests in companies across categories and geographies leading to market transitions. Airware, Aspire Food Group, Dedrone, OpenGov, Pindrop, Privoro, Sprinklr, and Uniphore are a few such examples. He also serves on the Board of Directors for Airware, OpenGov, Pindrop, and Sprinklr.

Prior to founding JC2 Ventures, Chambers was CEO, Chairman and Executive Chairman at Cisco Systems.

In addition to investing in and mentoring startups, he is focused on promoting entrepreneurship, gender equality, and accelerating overall new business creation around the world. Additionally, his role as the Chairman of the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF) allows him to work closely with business and government leaders in both countries to create meaningful opportunities that have the power to change the lives of citizens.

Aegis Graham Bell Awards

Winner in “Innovation in Data Science” category for “U-Analyze” at the 9th edition of Aegis Graham Bell Award 2019

Express IT Awards

Awarded the best product company in the Analytics Solutions category for 2018 at the 6th edition of Express IT Awards

Gartner

• Gartner names Uniphore in ‘Where are they now” section in “Cool Vendors in CRM Customer Service and Support, 2020” (Analysts: Brian Manusama, et al, Published: 15 May 2020)
• Gartner recognizes Uniphore as a Representative Vendor in Customer Service Interaction Analytics in “The Gartner Customer Service Technology Vendor Guide, 2019” (Analysts: Simon Harrison, et al, Published: 27 June 2019)
• Gartner names Uniphore as an Interaction Analytics vendor – Customer Service and CRM App Software in APAC in “The Gartner CRM Vendor Guide, 2018” (Analyst: Nadine LeBlanc et al, Published: 31 May 2018).
• Gartner names Uniphore as a Fast-growing digital service technology providers in its report titled “Market Trends: Customer Experience, Trust and Retention Define Opportunities for Customer Management Digital Services” (Analyst: TJ Singh, Published: 19 June 2018).
• Gartner names Uniphore as a Sample Vendor in its report titled “Hype Cycle for Contact Center Infrastructure, 2018” (Analyst: Drew Kraus, Published: 8 August 2018).
• Gartner names Uniphore as a Sample Vendor in its report titled “Hype Cycle for Data Science and Machine Learning, 2018”. (Analysts: Peter Krensky, Jim Hare, Published: 23 July 2018).
• Gartner names Uniphore as a Sample Vendor in its report titled “Hype Cycle for CRM Customer Service and Customer Engagement, 2018”. (Analyst: Olive Huang, Published: 25 July 2018).
• Gartner recognizes Uniphore as a vendor for Interaction Analysis – Customer Service in the Asia/Pacific – The Gartner CRM Vendor Guide, 2017
• Gartner report titled Predicts 2017: CRM Customer Service and Support (published Nov, 2016) mentions Uniphore as a regional vendor capable of supporting regional Indian languages
• Gartner selects Uniphore as a Cool Vendor for Human-Machine Interface (2013)

Forrester

Forrester recognizes Uniphore as a “growth stage” vendor in its report titled “New Tech: AI-Fueled Speech Analytics Solutions, Q2 2018”

Lumenlab

Winner of Collab – MetLife’s inaugural corporate – startup engagement program (2017)

Deloitte

Deloitte recognizes Uniphore as Technology Fast 50 India (2020)

Deloitte recognizes Uniphore as Technology Fast 50 India (2015)

Deloitte recognizes Uniphore as Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific (2015)

Deloitte recognizes Uniphore as Technology Fast 50 India (2014)

Deloitte recognizes Uniphore as Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific (2014)

Deloitte recognizes Uniphore as Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific (2013)

Frost & Sullivan

Frost & Sullivan names Uniphore as the Entrepreneurial Company of the Year for its Speech-based Enterprise Mobility Solutions (2012)

Asia-Pacific Customer Contact Solution Customer Value Leadership Award (2018)

IDG Ventures

Uniphore receives the Pride of India Awards by IDG Ventures (2015)

Nasscom

AI Game Changer Awards (2018)

League of 10 – NASSCOM Emerge 50 Awards (2017)

NASSCOM and Frost & Sullivan featured Uniphore’s VoiceNet in Indian Enterprise Software Product Excellence Matrix – On Accelerated Growth Path (2014)

League of 10 – NASSCOM Emerge 50 Awards (2013)

London & Partners

London & Partners recognizes Uniphore amongst India’s Top 20 Emerging Global Companies (2016)

Red Herring

Red Herring short-lists Uniphore for its Top 100 Asia Award(2012)

CII Connect

Umesh Sachdev, Founder & CEO, received the “Exemplary Application of IT Award” at the CII CONNECT 2014 Awards

EmTech India

Umesh Sachdev, CEO & Co-Founder, recognized with India Edition of MIT Technology Review’s ‘Innovators Under 35’ (2016)

The Smart CEO Startup50

Best Enterprise Tech Startup of the Year by The Smart CEO – Startup50 awards (2016)

RIM

Research in Motion highlights Uniphore as one of India’s top Enterprise Mobility Vendors (2012)

IDC

IDC recognizes Uniphore for delivering conversational AI, RPA, and workflow automation in its report “Speech-to-Text Software” (Published: August 2020).

IDC recognizes Uniphore for solving real problems during COVID-19 crisis in its report “Conversational AI in the era of COVID-19” (Published: April 2020)

Singapore Business Review Award

Singapore Business Review awarded Uniphore the ‘COVID Management Initiative of the Year’ in the AI company category at the sixth year of SBR Management Excellence Awards 2020.

ASSOCHAM

Uniphore recognized as the 1st Runner-Up in the ‘Best Employer for Diversity & Inclusion’ in the small category by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM) for 2021.