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Team

Archana Prasad

Archana Prasad

Founder - Trustee Founder Archana Prasad has championed technology-enabled participatory art for twenty years. She founded Gooey.AI, a Gen AI platform empowering creators and companies for positive change, and BeFantastic.in, nurturing tech art aligned with the UN's SDGs. As founder of Dara.network, she fostered cross-border creative collaborations via a video-first mobile app. Archana also invests in the cultural economy through Jaaga.

Freeman Murray

Freeman Murray

Founder Founder Freeman has spent 25 years in technology startups across India and the USA. In the US, he worked with the first internet music startup, the original Java group at Sun Microsystems, and founded and sold his own tech company to Excite at Home. In India, he led an incubation program at IIM Ahmedabad. Now, as founder of Mars.college, he pioneers new educational models. An engineer, entrepreneur, angel, & mentor, Freeman is a tech industry stalwart with a deep love of palette racks

Kamya Ramachandran

Kamya Ramachandran

Creative Director Passionate about community engagement, Kamya has pursued a non-linear career as an architect and public space designer. Embracing human interaction complexities, she navigates the intersections of creative practice, technology, education and stakeholder collaboration. Her diverse experiences, from rural India to urban centers like San Francisco & Singapore, focus on socio-environmental sustainability. She brings to Jaaga as well as BeFantastic.in, that she Founded.

Trustees & Advisors

Maureen Gonsalves

Maureen Gonsalves

Managing Trustee Maureen is Cultural Coordinator, Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Bangalore. She has played a strategic role in the artist-in-residence project right from inception, and in particular the Institut's flagship international cultural exchange programme - the bangaloREsidency. Maureen's long tenure helming at the very heart of contemporary arts in India, with the pulse of Europe at her fingertips makes her stewardship of Jaaga a natural fit and a great gift.

Gayathri Krishna

Gayathri Krishna

Trustee, Jaaga Trust Gayathri Krishna works for IBM as an Industry Lead for Banking and Financial Markets in Bangalore. She has a little over 20 years experience in the software industry, all of them in the Banking and Capital Marketsts sector. Gayathri was with i-flex solutions (now Oracle) for 17 years over which she played key roles in implementation, relationship management, testing and documentation of FLEXCUBE and MicroBanker, i-flex’s flagship Core Banking packages. She has extensive ons

Sean Blagsvedt

Sean Blagsvedt

Advisor Sean currently is the Founder-CEO of Gooey.AI. He is a pioneer in the tech for development area and brings this vision into Jaaga. He was the CEO and Founder of Babajob.com. Prior to founding Babajob, Sean spent 9 years at Microsoft, initially in the Office group in Redmond as a Program Manager, owning features such as Messenger integration, speech recognition and what was to later become the Vista sidebar. In 2002, Sean moved to the Windows Vista User Experience team.

Alumni

Dr. Tej Pochiraju

Fmr Director & Partner - Jaaga Startup Tej served as Jaaga Startup's Director from 2015-2019. He has been pivotal in building a skills sharing culture at Jaaga and a collaborative, building blocks approach to product development. He brings experience of new product development, R&D and a curiosity for new technologies advice to Jaaga. He holds a PhD in wireless engineering and has consulted with startups, SMEs and LEs globally.

Sarah Donnelly Patel

Fmr Advisor Sarah spent seven years in financial services in New York before moving to Bangalore. She led Jaaga from 2013-16 on financial & HR management. She set up best practices in both leveraging her project management experience and financial know-how. Sarah's constant and sage advice continues in Jaaga's DNA even today.

Jayna Kothari

Fmr Trustee, Jaaga Trust Jayna is a partner at Ashira Law and practices as a Counsel in the Karnataka High Court and the Supreme Court of India. Jayna’s research and practice interests include constitutional law, including the right to education, health and housing, gender, disability rights, environmental law. Jayna is also the co-founder of CLPR, a not-for-profit trust started in 2009 that engages in law and policy research, supported by strategic impact litigation.

Shekhar Mohan

Fmr Manager, Jaaga Startup Shekar's meticulous nature and kind persona are a wonderful mix to have at Jaaga. He kept our files & finances in order, as well as our world in general since joining us in 2011 till 2022.

Shaona Sen

Fmr Design Advisor Shaona contributes to design research and concept development phases of projects. She designed Jaaga's brandmark and helped us get our research processes in place. Shaona's consistent push to establish strategic partnerships is inspirational to us to date. Shaona Sen is a user centered designer whose goal is making learning playful and memorable. She has 9 years of experience across the sport, design and development sectors. Shaona is the founder of PassCollective.org.

Hasan S

Fmr Head of Learning Hasan brings in a good mix of creative experimentation and technical expertise to our learners program. He heads our learning initiatives with a belief in facilitating self-motivated learners on their quest to understand new terrain. He has facilitated technical sessions at various universities and colleges across the country including IIT-K and NID Bangalore. As a TechArtist, using AI, Electronics and code as his primary medium, he is a core partner of Betwen.Today

Bhavana Rao

Fmr Director, Co-working Bhavana finds in Architecture the perfect means to employ her idealism and empathy. She is driven by asking: What is responsible architecture? What is meaningful? What is beauty? What is sustainability? Architecture is her way of creating a thing and observing how it’s identity is shaped by time and people. Bhavana brought this thinking to Jaaga's Startup program for the CoVid year of 2020-2021.

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