The Top 25 Software CEOs of Asia for 2020

The Software Report is pleased to announce The Top 25 Software CEOs of Asia for 2020. With the global SaaS market projected to nearly double to $307 billion by 2026, it is no surprise that Asia has produced software powerhouses like those represented on this year’s list. Guided by their exceptional CEOs, these companies have produced ubiquitous software solutions that solve a variety of problems for individuals and enterprises alike.

The industry is showing no signs of slowing down, and these leaders have stepped up to the challenge of seizing the opportunities that lie ahead. They have set themselves apart within a highly competitive space. They have led their companies through successful funding rounds, the release of new products and services, and geographic expansion with agility and determination. In turn, they are fulfilling the missions of their companies while contributing to the rising tide of the software industry as a whole.

The Software Report team extends its congratulations to this year’s awardees of The Top 25 Software CEOs of Asia for 2020.

 

1. Li Xu
Company: SenseTime
Location: Science Park, Hong Kong

Li Xu is the Co-Founder and current Chief Executive Officer of SenseTime, the Hong Kong-based artificial intelligence company. Xu has led SenseTime since the company’s incorporation and helped it independently develop its proprietary deep learning platform. He has three algorithms that have been included in the visual open-source platform, OpenCV, and his “L0 Smoothing” algorithm garnered the most citations in research papers over five years within the ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), a scientific journal that Thomson Reuters has placed first among software engineering journals.

Prior to joining SenseTime, Xu served as a manager at Lenovo. Xu has published more than 50 papers at international conferences and in journals in the field of computer vision and won the Best Paper Award at the international conference on Non-Photorealistic Rendering and Animation (NPAR) 2012. He also won the Best Reviewer Award at the Conference on Computer Vision ACCV 2012 and International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2015. He holds a PhD in computer science and engineering from The Chinese University of Hong Kong as well as a Master of Science degree and a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science and engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

 

2. Liu Qingfeng
Company: iFlytek
Location: Hefei, China

Liu Qingfeng is the Founder Chief Executive Officer of iFlytek, the Chinese science and technology company that focuses on the research and development of speech technology, software, and chip products and services. The company also develops voice messaging software and e-government system integration software. Qingfeng, a scientist-turned entrepreneur, founded iFlytek in 1999 when he was still a graduate student, and today, iFlytek is the leading enterprise in China’s AI industry. Qingfeng attributes his success to his choice of direction, gathering a talented team, and choosing the right method of industrialization.

In addition to his current role, Qingfeng is the Director of the National Speech and Language Engineering Laboratory of China, a Professor and Doctoral Advisor with USTC, the Director-General of the Union of Speech Industry of China, and the Director-General of the Union of National University Student Innovation and Entrepreneurship. He received his PhD from the University of Science and Technology of China.

 

3. Siddhartha Gupta
Company: Mettl
Location: Gurugram, India

Siddhartha Gupta is the Chief Executive Officer of Mettl, the Indian-based online assessment platform providing solutions to track and measure technical, aptitude, and psychometric skills. Gupta was previously the chief revenue officer at the company. As the CEO, Gupta heads all key departments across the company’s global and domestic operations, oversees its ongoing expansion in India and globally, and focuses on user acquisition and development to help Mettl build winning teams.

With a career spanning more than two decades, Gupta has a proven track record of successfully growing IT giants like Hewlett-Packard and SAP in India. His leading teams built business verticals from scratch and brought them to scale. Before Mettl, Gupta spent ten years at SAP, most recently as vice president of strategic industries, four years at Hewlett-Packard as an account manager, and he started his career as the executive assistant to the managing director at Compaq Computers. Gupta holds a dual Post Graduate Diploma in business management and marketing management from the Xavier Institute of Management and The Times School of Marketing.

 

4. Kushal Nahata
Company: FarEye
Location: New Delhi, India

Kushal Nahata is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of FarEye, a digital logistics platform that efficiently moves goods. Nahata co-founded FarEye with Gaurav Srivastava and Gautam Kumar. Established in 2013, FarEye is a logistics intelligence platform that serves as a technology solution for e-commerce businesses and logistic operations. It launched a SaaS platform that allows merchants and business owners to efficiently and effectively deliver goods with data analytics, mobility, and automation. A dynamic leader, Nahata drives the customer-first culture at FarEye, which enables the team to provide value to its clients globally, which include Hitachi, Bajaj Capital, Gojavas, Blue Dart, Safexpress, DTDC, Holisol, and Ecom Express.

Nahata is an innovative thinker who is passionate about enabling logistics enterprises’ digital transformations and is continuously working towards empowering companies to champion operational efficiency and customer experience. Under his leadership, FarEye has achieved a 300% growth rate with an impressive geographical expansion. Before co-founding FarEye and serving as its CEO, Nahata worked as a team leader in Learnics until 2011, training more than 10,000 engineering students. He then worked with business operations mobility platform Robotic Wares as the head of business development and strategy from May 2011 until the end of 2012. Nahata studied electronics and telecommunication at the Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology.

 

5. Emmanuel Benzaquen
Company: Checkmarx
Location: Ramat Gan, Israel

Emmanuel Benzaquen is the Chief Executive Officer of Checkmarx, the Israel-based application security software company whose mission is to provide enterprise organizations with application security testing products and services that empower developers to deliver secure software faster. Benzaquen has been the CEO since the company’s inception in 2006 and he has played a pivotal role in turning the company into an international software powerhouse. The executive has also pioneered an array of leading application security solutions. In that time, he has accumulated considerable experience understanding how to translate complex technologies into simple, understandable use cases.

In 2019, Benzaquen led his company through a record fiscal year, with more than 60% year-over-year revenue growth. This was fueled by the addition of 400 new large-enterprise customers. Over the past year, he oversaw the launch of a new software exposure platform, an increase in headcount, channel expansion, and a key acquisition. Before Checkmarx, Benzaquen was involved with several start-up companies and the Israeli VC industry at large. Prior to that, he headed the Business Development Group at ARC in San Jose, CA, which completed its IPO in 2000. Benzaquen earned his Master of Science degree in electrical engineering from Polytech Nantes and his Master of Business Administration degree from the International School of Management.

 

6. Amit Jain
Company: CarDekho
Location: Jaipur, India

Amit Jain is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder at CarDekho and Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder at GirnarSoft. Founded in 2007, GirnarSoft, an IT outsourcing firm, launched CarDekho in 2008. CarDekho is a website and mobile application that helps its users to buy the right car. It does this through a platform that carries rich automotive content such as expert reviews, details of all specifications, prices, comparisons, and videos and pictures of all brands and models available in India. The idea came about after Jain and his brother attended an auto expo in Delhi. After collecting all the brochures, they decided to go home and input all the information into a database. Within two weeks, they were ready to take CarDekho live.

Today, CarDekho is India’s leading auto platform serving over 14 million visitors a month. In addition to CarDekho, the brothers also own other successful platforms like ZigWheels, Gaadi, BikeDekho, and CarWale under Girnar. Previously, Jain was a product manager at Trilogy, an enterprise-class software and service solutions provider targeted to the automotive industry. Jain began his career as a software engineer at Tata Consultancy Services and studied at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

 

7. Samay Kohli
Company: GreyOrange
Location: Gurugram, India

Samay Kohli is Founder and Chief Executive Officer at GreyOrange, the Indian tech startup creating hardware and software products for the warehousing industry. The Gurugram-based company has received funds from investors such as U.S.-based Tiger Global Management, one of the world’s largest hedge funds. Kohli and Akash Gupta launched the company in 2011 after developing, while in college, what they believe to be India’s first humanoid robot. Seeing China’s e-commerce boom, they spotted “an industry ripe for disruption,” said Kohli. GreyOrange sells swarms of “butler” robots, which store products and bring shelves to human workers, and “sorters,” which automatically scan and sort packages of any size or shape.

The company boasts 92% of India’s warehouse automation market, a sector that Kohli thinks “can become humongous.” Today, GreyOrange boasts an impressive client list that includes India’s leading e-commerce retailers such as Flipkart, Snapdeal, Myntra, Jabong, and courier-services companies DTDC and Dubai-based Aramax. Before GreyOrange, Kohli was an intern at Robotis and was a founder at the Center for Robotics and Intelligent Systems. Kohli received his Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering and a Master of Science degree in economics from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science.

 

8. Amit Singh
Company: Shuttl
Location: Gurugram, India

Amit Singh is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Shuttl, an Indian app-based shuttle service that makes users' daily commutes safe, reliable, and affordable. Founded in 2015, the technology-enabled, seat-based, demand-adaptive bus mobility service helps users select from prefixed routes and schedules to commute from home to work. The company catalyzes a shift away from private vehicles toward shared mobility—a win-win for citizens and cities. It also drives entrepreneurship by providing bus-owners on its platform with the latest technology, better financing, and relevant training to help them scale and participate in offering a smarter, safer, and greener solution to bus riders.

Singh used to work on the Delhi Metro and later at investment firms before going on to work at Jabong. With his experience in transportation and consumer internet, Singh decided to combine the two industries. Since its inception, Shuttl has helped save 32,300 tons of CO2 emissions and has facilitated over 22 million shared rides. In the past year, it doubled its ridership to 75,000 rides per day, displacing 16,000 cars and freeing an equivalent road space of 53 km each day. Singh graduated with a degree in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and has a Master of Business Administration degree from XLRI Jamshedpur.

 

9. Anshul Rai
Company: Happay
Location: Bangalore, India

Anshul Rai is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Happay, an Indian AI-powered business expense management software that enables businesses to automate their expense management process. In his current role, Rai oversees technology and possible business collaborations at Happay. Happay hopes to be the smart solution that helps companies. For example, Happay prepaid VISA cards enable businesses to give employees the freedom to spend as they track and approve their expenses within set limits through the Happay dashboard. Employees can snap photos of receipts, record cash expenses, and submit expense reports. Happay currently has more than 5,000 business customers across 40 verticals.

Rai has always loved coding, so it comes as no surprise that after graduating from college, he scored a coveted position at the Microsoft Research Lab. Here, he filed two patents and published four papers in international journals. In 2012, Rai then founded Happay after noticing that the choice of payment options available to businesses was limited to cash, paper checks, and current accounts. Rai earned his Bachelor of Technology degree in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.

 

10. Tomer Bar-Zeev
Company: ironSource
Location: Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel

Tomer Bar-Zeev is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of ironSource, the Israel-based developer of engagement and analytical tools designed to empower mobile and digital businesses. Bar-Zeev has overseen the company’s growth since its inception and is passionate about making ironSource a global company by spearheading its international growth and establishing offices on five continents. The executive started his career developing popular consumer software products, which was instrumental in giving him a comprehensive understanding of what developers need to turn great products into successful businesses, and that focus still drives him today.

A technology veteran, Bar-Zeev has worked at Microsoft, Payoneer, and Atlas CT before he founded ironSource in 2010 to address the challenges developers face in turning their products into successful businesses. He was also the co-founder and chief executive officer of FoxTab, a popular 3D tab management browser add-on for Firefox, which joined the ironSource family of companies in 2011. Bar-Zeev is a member of the Young Entrepreneurs Council, sits on the board of the IATI, and is an active investor in other technology startups. Bar-Zeev earned a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from IDC Herzliya.

 

11. Raghu Ravinutala
Company: Yellow Messenger
Location: Bangalore, India

Raghu Ravinutala is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Yellow Messenger, the Indian software platform that serves as an enterprise AI channel for customer engagement. The executive co-founded Yellow Messenger with Jaya Kishore Reddy and Rashid Khan in 2016, with a vision to make customer and enterprise interactions more effective and effortless. What started as a weekend side hustle—which was brought together in just four months—now counts the likes of Schlumberger, MG Motor, and Accenture among its clients. Today, it offers its services across multiple channels such as WhatsApp, Google Assistant, and Alexa.

Ravinutala has worked with leading technology companies, where he served in varying leadership roles for over 16 years. Before founding Yellow Messenger, Ravinutala was a senior manager of IC design engineering, and processors and wireless infrastructure at Broadcom. He was also the vice president of product management at TeleradTech, director of applications engineering at Magma Design Automation, and began his career at Texas Instruments. Ravinutala earned his Bachelor of Technology degree from the National Institute of Technology, Warangal.

 

12. Gaurav Munjal
Company: Unacademy
Location: Bangalore, India

Gaurav Munjal is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Unacademy, the Indian online learning platform that provides educational content such as video lectures and examinations. According to Munjal, when he started Unacademy, his objective was very clear—to build the largest educational platform in the world. He started Unacademy as an educational YouTube channel in 2010 when he was in college. In 2013, he set up his first company, Flat.to, a real estate platform for college students and bachelors across India, which was later acquired by CommonFloor.com. Unacademy was established as a company in 2015 and has achieved exponential growth and success since its inception.

Backed by prominent venture firms and with over 10,000 educators and 3 million learners on the platform, Unacademy has created a global reputation in the e-learning sector. In September of this year, Unacademy raised $150 million in a Series F round led by SoftBank Group, valuing the company at $1.4 billion. Munjal began his career as an intern at Metacube, where he built a web application on the Google App Engine using Spring Framework. Munjal graduated from NMIMS University, Mumbai with a Bachelor of Technology degree in computer science.

 

13. Rohit Chennamaneni
Company: Darwinbox
Location: Hyderabad, India

Rohit Chennamaneni is a Co-Founder at Darwinbox, the Indian end-to-end enterprise HR software that enables enterprises to automate the entire employee lifecycle in one HR platform. As a digital expert, Chennamaneni handles operations, investments, customer success, and expansion strategy at Darwinbox. He has vast experience in combining business strategy and technology and aspires to create disruptive products, business models, and teams to drive growth and revenue. Darwinbox was built to serve large enterprises and competes with the likes of SAP SuccessFactors and Oracle Fusion.

Before co-founding Darwinbox, Chennamaneni worked as a strategy consultant at McKinsey & Company in their India, U.S., and Africa offices. He worked across sales, operations, human resources, and leadership development. Prior to this, he worked at Google as a Search Quality Analyst. At Google he built the local language search auto-suggest classifier and launched the Google Bus initiative in India, known as the CSR initiative, to educate tier-two towns about the internet. Chennamaneni completed his Master of Business Administration degree at the Indian Institute of Management.

 

14. Shashank Dixit
Company: Deskera
Location: Central Region, Singapore

Shashank Dixit is the Chief Executive Officer at Deskera, the Singapore cloud-based business software provider of Integrated Business Applications as a Service (BAaaS). The company’s fully integrated Cloud ERP Suite is designed to run businesses on the cloud. Its solutions allow SMEs to track finances, manage customers, and hire and manage employees. Dixit started with Deskera in 2008. The company has expanded rapidly in the last ten years and today has more than 400 employees across 10 countries, including Singapore, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and the U.S.

Dixit attended the Indian Institute of Technology and during his last year, he decided to build the best cloud software for small businesses. From there, Dixit built Deskera over the span of eight years. Since founding Deskera, he has grown the company's product suite across ERP, CRM, HCM, project management, and learning management and expanded the business globally. As an entrepreneur at heart, he also loves to help and guide young entrepreneurs on their own journeys.

 

15. Toru Nishikawa
Company: Preferred Networks
Location: Tokyo, Japan

Toru Nishikawa is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Preferred Networks, the Japanese company that develops the real-world applications of deep learning, robotics, and other modern technologies. Nishikawa set up the company’s predecessor, Preferred Infrastructure, in 2006 while he was in graduate school at the University of Tokyo. Fellow co-founder Daisuke Okanohara and Nishikawa met at the University of Tokyo, where they studied computer science in the early 2000s. The search engine developer spun off its deep-learning business in 2014, which became Preferred Networks.

Nishikawa founded Preferred Networks with the aim of expanding its businesses into the realization of deep intelligence, a future of IoT technology in which all devices, as well as the network itself, are equipped with machine intelligence. He is an ambitious entrepreneur and programmer whose fascination with computers started in elementary school. Nishikawa is an ICPC and ACM Programming Contest World Finalist and recipient of the 2013 Software Japan Award of the Information Processing Society of Japan. He received his Master of Science degree from the University of Tokyo.

 

16. Sahil Sheth
Company: LIDO
Location: Mumbai, India

Sahil Sheth is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer at LIDO Learning, an Indian ed-tech company that revolutionizes education through an immersive online platform. The company was founded in 2019, with the hope to make sure that every single student learns from the perfect class, every time. LIDO is built to disrupt the tuition class market by enabling students to have a highly interactive, personalized small-group tutorial experience with expert tutors from the comfort of their homes.

Sheth has been in the edtech industry for the last eight years. After selling his first company Infinite Student to BYJU’S, he served as their vice president until 2018. He then spent a month in China, understanding how the entire tutoring market had moved online in the country. He saw how much safer and more convenient it was, especially for younger kids, and how parents could truly understand their child’s learning capabilities through advanced analytics. He realized that learning could be improved by tracking students’ performance and using interactive mediums and went on to found LIDO. Sheth earned his Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics and economics from Duke University.

 

17. Agung Hadinegoro
Company: Warung Pintar
Location: Jakarta, Indonesia

Agung Hadinegoro is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Warung Pintar, an Indonesian micro-retail technology company whose name means “smart kiosk” in Indonesian. Warung Pintar aims to help warungs—small, family-owned businesses—embrace the digital era by enabling them to perform online transactions and digitize their bookkeeping, warehousing, distribution, and cash register processes. The company has achieved two important milestones since its inception in 2018: the number of businesses it has helped (which has reached beyond 1,300 shops) and the significant increase in monthly income it has helped customers to achieve (with 22% of the businesses experiencing at least 10% growth each month).

Hadinegoro began his entrepreneurship journey by working in a venture capital firm. He started Warung Pintar as a special project when he was an investment analyst at VC firm East Ventures. His continued involvement in Warung Pintar was fueled by his passion for helping small and medium-sized enterprises. In his work, he claims to be inspired by the achievements that his grandmother has made as a pediatrician and academic. Hadinegoro holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in intermedia and a Master of Business Administration degree from the Bandung Institute of Technology.

 

18. Tony Han
Company: WeRide.ai
Location: Guangzhou, China

Tony Han is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at WeRide.ai, a smart mobility company in China that creates leading L4 autonomous driving technologies. Founded by Han in 2017 along with Qing Lu and Yan Li, the company is headquartered in Guangzhou, China, and maintains R&D and operation centers in Beijing and Anqing, as well as in Silicon Valley. As a progenitor of autonomous driving, Han emphasizes that technology is the foundation and the key to achieving fully self-driving vehicles.

Han was the former chief scientist of Baidu’s Autonomous Driving Unit and tenured professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Missouri. He is also an original contributor to DeepSpeech2, which was selected as one of ten breakthrough technologies in 2016 by MIT Technology. Han earned his Bachelor of Science degree in electrical and computer engineering from Beijing Jiaotong University and his Master of Science degree in computer engineering from the University of Rhode Island. He went on to earn a PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

 

19. Sheng Fu
Company: Cheetah Mobile
Location: Beijing, China

Sheng Fu is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Cheetah Mobile, a mobile internet company that develops mobile applications and provides internet security software for its clients. Fu founded Cheetah Mobile in 2010, and it found a business making security apps such as Security Master for smartphones. Now it is a publicly traded company valued at $2.2 billion. Cheetah’s offerings include a wide range of utility tools from file management applications to antivirus software for mobile devices. Its flagship utility tools are Clean Master and Security Master, which together have been downloaded more than 4.1 billion times globally.

Fu is also the Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Keniu, a picture software company that offers picture editing, management, and browsing. Prior to that, he served at Qihoo Company and was tasked with overseeing client businesses, and served at Matrix Partners as the vice president. Fu also held positions at 3721 Company and Beijing Guoxin Baofusi Software Company. Fu obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in economics from the Shandong Institute of Business and Technology.

 

20. Dai Wenyuan
Company: 4Paradigm
Location: Beijing, China

Dai Wenyuan is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of 4Paradigm, a Chinese AI technology firm that helps enterprises to improve work efficiency, reduce risks, and achieve greater commercial values. Wenyuan has led the AI research departments for numerous Chinese tech giants such as Baidu and Huawei. This led him to establish 4Paradigm in 2015 with a distinct vision: to eliminate the technical barrier for those looking to apply AI technology, or as he likes to put it, “AI for everyone.”

As a university student, Wenyuan won the ACM-ICPC world championship in 2005. Today, he’s an entrepreneur and a scholar who is recognized as a global leader in transfer learning (a sub-area of machine learning) with the third most cited paper in his field in the world. He came up with the concept of “Unsupervised Transfer Learning” and became a pioneer in this important research area. The concepts of “Translation Learning” and the “General Framework for Transfer Learning” were also his creations. From 2015 to 2017, 4Paradigm expanded AI technology into the Chinese banking sector with more than half of the top 20 banks adopting 4Paradigm’s AI solutions. Wenyuan earned his Bachelor of Engineering and Master of Engineering degrees from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

 

21. Shyamal Kumar
Company: Lavelle Networks
Location: Bangalore, India

Shyamal Kumar is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Lavelle Networks. The fastest-growing SDN upstart in Asia, Lavelle Networks has received rapid market adoption and has built the largest SD-WAN networks in the world. The ScaleAOnTM software platform is hardware agnostic, multi-cloud, and uses intent driven policies. Lavelle Networks is also the world’s first network appliance platform, driven only using cloud-native REST APIs, and all software is orchestrated using Linux containers. Kumar and his team believe that today’s cloud-first, digital-driven enterprises can take their business anywhere, as long as the network is available. Their vision is to empower businesses to have the best possible network experience for every application, on every cloud, on any device, and for any user. The ScaleAOnTM platform has been rolled out across India, the Middle East, Africa, and the U.S.

Kumar is a data networks product leader and has led several platforms spanning data center, enterprise, and service provider networks. Having started his career with the venerable FreeBSD TCP/IP stack, to the current SDN/NFV platforms, he has been instrumental in breakthrough product lines like Juniper MX. He also brought the initial generation of wireless broadband platforms to the world through the Telsima WiMAX portfolio. Back in 2001, he was a key member of Inkra Networks, building the industry’s first virtual services switch. Kumar is a graduate of BITS, Pilani.

 

22. Dhiraj Rajaram
Company: Mu Sigma
Location: Bangalore, India

Dhiraj Rajaram is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Mu Sigma, the Indian data analytics services provider that develops decision support system tools and software. The company was founded in 2004 and Rajaram was inspired by the lessons learned from positions at Fortune 500 companies. Solving complex business problems required a radical departure from the silo mentality that separates programmers, analysts, and mathematicians at many consulting firms. Rajaram envisioned a fresh, interdisciplinary approach that brought together math, business technology, behavioral science, and design-based thinking.

Today, Mu Sigma does just that for companies operating in the airline, hospitality and entertainment, pharmaceuticals and healthcare, BFSI, CPG, retail, technology, and telecom industries. Prior to founding Mu Sigma, Rajaram worked at Booz Allen Hamilton and PwC. These positions helped him to realize that there is more to analytics than just data and black-box models. Rajaram completed his Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering at the College of Engineering, his Master of Science degree in computer engineering from Wayne State University, Michigan, and his Master of Business Administration degree from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago.

 

23. Raheel Iqbal
Company: Codebase Technologies
Location: Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Raheel Iqbal is the Managing Partner of Codebase Technologies, a pioneer in the software space through its design, development, and launch of three digital banks within the GCC and Europe. Iqbal started Codebase Technologies in 2017, and through meticulous mentorship of all employees from inception, has helped grow the headcount from 15 staff members in 2017 to over 170 full-time employees today. He has been an instrumental force within the R&D of Codebase’s products and services, which span 14 systems.

He has over 15 years of technology and product consulting experience working with leading institutions across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, building and implementing technology-enabled frameworks for digital banking operations, regulatory compliance, payments, cards, and platform integration. His rich history of working alongside the C-suite and advisory levels offers a robust background rooted in strategic product propositions and operational excellence. He has extensive experience in both GCC and European digital banking compliance for onboarding and payments services. He is also an influential speaker and facilitator on various technology and finance-related topics including banking, payments, fintech, and finance, both in GCC and beyond. Iqbal is a graduate of the Manchester Business School, U.K.

 

24. Diwakar Nigam
Company: Newgen Software Technologies
Location: Delhi, India

Diwakar Nigam is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Newgen Software Technologies and Founder at NASSCOM. Founded in 1992, Newgen provides business process management, enterprise content management, and document management systems. Newgen was established as Nigam pursued his dream of building a world-class product development company. Today, Newgen is involved in the development of enterprise content management and business process management software, making an impact in India and around the world. Newgen’s list of clients includes some of the world’s largest banks, insurance companies, BPOs, and MNCs.

Under Nigam’s leadership, Newgen has garnered a team of highly qualified software professionals to develop innovative software. Nigam has been an active player in the national software industry as a founding member of NASSCOM, the industry association for the IT-BPO sector in India. He is also a member of the Anti-Piracy Task Group formed by NASSCOM. Prior to forming Newgen, Nigam incorporated Softek Limited and briefly worked at HCL in software research and development. Nigam received graduate degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and the Indian Institute of Technology New Delhi and received an undergraduate degree from the University of Allahabad.

 

25. Wayne Wang
Company: CDP Group
Location: Shanghai, China

Wayne Wang is the Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer of CDP Group, an integrative technology platform that offers a full suite of products and services that address the needs of human capital management. CDP Group operates throughout Asia and offers consulting and HR managed services such as payroll and benefit outsourcing, HR on-demand, and HR shared services. Under Wang’s leadership, the company has raised a total of $118.3 million over four funding rounds from major investors such as Morgan Stanley.

Prior to founding CDP, Wang held various senior international executive positions with large MNCs across the U.S., Europe, and China for over 20 years. Wang was the chairman of the EuroCham HR Forum and board member of the Shanghai Services Federation, and he is also a Special Advisor for SHRCA. Most recently he served as an advisory board member of A Capital, a Europe-China private equity fund that already has a number of cross-border landmark deals. He is also a regular at Forbes Global CEO Conferences. Wang graduated from Fudan University with a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science. He also received a Master of Science degree in computer engineering and statistics from the University of Iowa and a Master of Business Administration degree from HEC-Paris.