OUR BOARD OF DIRECTORS
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Arun Venkatesan
Co-Founder & CEO
Arun Venkatesan is Co-founder and CEO of Villgro USA. Till June 2019, he was CTO of Villgro India, leading their health sector investments. He has over 15 years of experience in materials R&D, device development and forward integration of technology into tangible, marketable entities. He has a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering and has done post-doctoral research in fuel-cell materials development and micro-fuel-cell fabrication.
After about 2 decades of product development work in the US, he worked in India for 7 years. He has worked for various small-scale and start-up companies both in the US and India, in a product development capacity leveraging academic research groups and independent development teams. He has extensive experience coordinating development projects using external vendors for rapid turn-around of various product components.
His current focus is the development of affordable and sustainable products for BoP. More recently, his teams have successfully commercialized ‘Brilliance - A low cost phototherapy device for premature babies’ and ‘SmartCane - An affordable navigation aid for the visually impaired’. He also led three projects in assistive devices funded by Wellcome Trust (DotBook, Arise). He is part of judging and design review panels for CII and ASME iShow to evaluate companies and their ideas.