Althea Systems is focused on building solutions that simplify online video discovery and consumption across multiple screens by stitching together latest technology, the brave new social web and good old common sense.
About Althea
Team
Kishore
Co-founder, CEO
Kishore is a passionate geek who lives and thrives on social media. He single-handedly makes up for the Gen-Y deficiency in team Althea :^). He likes taking risks and has an abhorrence for the status quo.
He is determined to ride his bike on every road in India, build companies that dwarf GOOG, AAPL, CSCO, MSFT and give his best shot at attaining nirvana in this life. Having been a bully most of his life, he is showing signs of mellowing down after Milo started getting the better of him.
As the CEO, Kishore is responsible for setting the company's direction and product strategy, as well as running day to day operations.
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Vijaya Sagar
Co-founder, Platforms
Sagar wonders why Dijkstra, Kernighan, Ritchie, Chomsky, Kafka, Wodehouse et.al., are not yet following him on Twitter. Someone in his close circles calls him a megalomaniac (rather unfairly).
He knows that one day he will make his billions, go off on a solo climb to his high-altitude Himalayan cave, sit there and craft a 42-complication tourbillon by hand, while listening to Indian classical music and smooth Jazz (at the same time). But, when will he complete writing that master key to Hopcroft & Ullman's thriller?
At Althea, Sagar works with platforms on the principle that only with exquisite attention to both form and function, can a great product be built.
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Posterous
Rajnish
Co-founder, Business
Rajnish is a fan of Jerry Maguire's "show me the money". In his 16 year career, Rajnish has been associated with companies that are #1 in their respective fields of operation - Microsoft, ESPN, Times of India and AMUL. This association has rubbed off on him and he is now obesessed with building the world's #1 online video company.
In his free time Rajnish is trying to complete a magnum opus titled "rain, fire, earth and wind" which he thinks will win him a Booker prize at-least. He runs at Ulsoor Lake every weekend and is falling in love with Yoga (he is already a Zen Master).
At Althea Systems, Rajnish drives consumer marketing, monetization, business strategy and biz dev.
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Amrit Pal Singh
Developer/Hacker - Anything
Amrit is a man of few words. He is a video game junkie who dreams to be a Billionaire one day.
He plans to start a restaurant in Bangalore just to show the city what authentic North Indian Food really means. He is a fitness enthusiast and loves doing his Yoga. Amrit's long standing desires include flying a Sukhoi and sky diving.
As employee number 007 at Althea, he is on a mission to build the World's Coolest Online Video App. He loves working on RIAs and feels it's the most exciting work he has done till now.
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Sarala V
Bug Detective
Sarala (sanskrit for simple) tries to stay true to her name. She claims she was an athlete and loves to play outdoor games such as Sudoku! When indoors, she plays the harmonium.
Sarala dreams of backpacking to Africa and enjoying its natural beauty from atop a tree house. For now, she spends her free time gardening.
At Althea, sniffing out bugs in the world's coolest app is giving her the thrills (if she hasn't put them in herself).
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Murali
Manager - Operations
Murali loves his farming. So, he decided to join the next big thing on the web!
At Althea, except for writing code (sigh), Murali ensures everything else gets done.
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Paul Victor
The (invisible) Platform Guy
He likes to be called Viktor (with the 'k'). Paul doesnt spend a day without listening to AC/DC and is on a mission to reduce the world's chicken population.
Apart from predicting the outcomes of football matches, Paul wants to explore the uninhabited wilderness of Antartica and have Penguins for breakfast (sorry Linus).
Paul is the one who knows best, how to introduce new complexities into the ShuffleFeed platform core.
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Praveen
Developer - fruitOS
Praveen fell in love with programming soon after college and hasn't understood what the word 'work' means.
Praveen is inspired by Apple design & loves following cricket (be it international or street-side!). He is a big fan of Calvin (& Hobbes), Tendulkar, Federer & Maradona (in that order).
He felt he was getting rusty working at big companies. So, he decided to join an exciting young startup.
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Ajith Hussain
SkunkWorker in Chief
Ajith (aka Sparkymat) believes that one day, the whole world will run on Ruby. He is fervently working to accelerate the coming of this Ru(by)topia by incessantly pitching Ruby to everyone he comes in contact with.
He spends his free time shuttling between video games, movies, comics, sci-fi novels and hopes one day to publish at least one of each of the above.
Althea. Ajith. Android. Apps. Aha!
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Vamsi Krishna
Algorithmist
In an other universe, Vamsi is a behavioral profiler akin to Sherlock Holmes but in this one he uses his skills to write better profiling systems. Through this, he wants to realize his passion of building sentient systems (don't panic, he has watched "I, Robot").
He spends time reading books covering (but not restricted to) Economics, Telugu literature and Tech. He is also a student of fine arts and wants to make good of his learning in the future.
Startups are not new to Vamsi. He has had his share. He was close to stepping over to the dark side (Big Corps), when the red pill of Althea turned irresistible.
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Rajasingh Samuel
Fun loving developer, wannabe UX analyst
Sam took to the babbage engine for Age of Empires II and ended up writing code for a living. This paladin often hits the weekend road for long drives on his 1000cc charriot.
When he is not hanging out with buddies on Brigade Road, he is busy following trends in mobile & web techs.
At Althea, his main job is to get browsers to behave with our apps.
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Sreejith
Resident van Gogh
Sreejith can photoshop a mouthwatering bowl of curry. And eat it too.
A man of many hobbies, from watching horror movies to dancing & gold smithy. When you see him work in his silence, you will know why Gandhiji is one of his role models.
At Althea, Sreejith pulls ideas out of his teammates' minds and turns them into colourful canvases.
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Sravan
Algorithmist, Jr.
Sravan is calm & reserved. Probably because he is preoccupied with strategies for AOE, NFS and Counter Strike.
Amongst the youngest of our tribe, he brings in a much needed skill to Team Althea ('can watch the same movie over 20 times, hey!').
At work, Sravan mines deep into large heaps of data and extracts interesting patterns.
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Rutika
Developer on a mission
Rutika adds to the list of introverts in our team.
Nibbles a bit of lunch but claims she is a foodie (btw, she loves Pacman). A travel bug who likes comics and animated movies. She says, "While I'm earning my daily bread I want to share a slice with the less fortunate."
At Althea, Rutika can be spotted hacking our web app on one hand and our Facebook app on another.
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Smita
Developer - Rails by the beach
Smita makes a hard living, coding from the pristine sandy shores of the Goan sea. One of her key challenges is ensuring that her Macbook doesn't get washed away by the waves while she's sipping some tender coconut water.
Gaurang
The Interaction Designer
Gaurang loves to explore experimental interaction design. Table tennis for instance, has a lot of interaction. Ergo, he loves it. If you ever see a backpacker mixing design with wistful childhood tales of the Uttaranchal mountains, you've seen the man.
Gaurang believes in creating meaningful relationships between people and the products & services they use. His passion for design can be summed up with this quote of Steve Jobs: "We're here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise why else even be here?"
Rajesh
Platform Performance Enforcer
Rajesh joined us after getting a written assurance that we will put up bunker beds in the office. He had already checked out if we had enough PS3 game titles of his liking. Right now, he is campaigning for stocking up the cafeteria fridge with Soya milk and exotic fruits. And yes, it is generally advised not to get into a mortal combat with him on the topic of Rajni.
If you know what he does at work, please fill up this section.
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Vijay
Bug Detective Jr. & Pro-am Lensman
Vijay is a sharp shooter. His heavy carbine SLR is a much feared regular at all the parties he is accidentally invited to. He threatens us with a promise that he will be starting a photo blog on our pages soon.
Althea is his first workplace and he seems to be having more fun than here than in his college. Why else would anyone live his nights out at the office?
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Sharad
Apps Dev aka The Swiss Knife
Sharad - bespectacled, studious and innocent - betrayed very little of his wild side during his internship with us. The day after he joined us full time, we found out that he is an anime addict, sets some real heavy metal for his phone ring tones and has a thing for bizarre gmail themes.
At Althea, Sharad is pulling off neat tricks on our Android and iOS apps.
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Investors
Intel Capital
Angel investors from India and Silicon Valley
Board
Kishore
Co-founder, CEO
Vinod Gopinath
Co-founder
Vinod is a gizmo freak. If it has a screen and plays video, he probably owns it. He is passionate about his music and believes his playlists have been copied into more iPods than U2 songs have been torrented on the internet.
He insists his engineering and management background will help him build a wireless, multimedia gizmo that will usher in world peace and solve the world’s hunger problems.
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Advisors
Arun Johary
Arun is a Consumer Electronics industry veteran & an entrepreneur. Previously, Arun was the co-founder of Armedia Labs (acquired by Broadcom), CTO of Sage Inc/Genesis Microchip (IPO, acquired by Genesis) and Co-Founder of Truespan (acquired by SiRF). His current venture Triazz builds technology for connected digital photo frames.
Rajesh Sawhney
Rajesh is a new media, entertainment, telecom and IT industry veteran with over 20 years of experience with world-leading brands. Rajesh is the President of Reliance Entertainment, leading the media and entertainment arm of the Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group. Previously, Rajesh was the founder and COO at Times Internet, where he grew the business from scratch. Rajesh is an angel investor in many start-ups and is an active member of the Mumbai Angels.
Ramesh Haridas
Ramesh is an Internet entrepreneur and an investor in early stage internet startups. Currently, he is a partner at HT Ventures. Ramesh was the Founder and CEO of PrivacyBank.com (acquired by Infospace) and Founder and CEO of Chintano (acquired by Datran media). Ramesh has invested in Blip.tv, iMedix, Mashery, Lookery, CPM Advisors, Cooler Planet, Esaya, Zedo, Webchutney (sold stake to TV18), Grisoft(sold stake to Enterprise Investors), Refinery29, 8tracks, Quorus, TasteKid, Cooler Planet, Founder's Co-op, Mobitrans.net and GreenPatch (acquired by Playdom).
Ro Gupta
Ro leads business development and commercial strategy for DISQUS, the largest community platform of its kind and one of the largest networks on the web reaching over 400 million users each month. Previously, Ro held digital business development, strategy and product roles at Disney, Tribune Interactive, ABC News and Live365, and has worldwide corporate advisory experience with management consulting firm, Marakon Associates. Ro was born in Kolkata, resides in New York and spends much of his time in San Francisco and Silicon Valley as well.
Sunil Krishnan
Sunil is the President of Confident Group, a fast growing conglomerate with business interests across diversified verticals. Prior to Confident, he was Director (Finance), South East Asia for Hewlett Packard. In 16 years of his career at HP, he has held various positions in manufacturing, supply chain services, operations and finance gaining insight into various facets of corporate management. Sunil is also the CEO of Stratos Management which is an incubator for startups. Sunil has investments in Elina Networks, Blueshift and open2save.