About Smiota

As CEO, Manju is responsible for overall operations overseeing everything from budgeting to strategy development for business growth at Smiota. Manju has over 25 years of experience in Silicon Valley working at leading high-tech semiconductor companies such as AMD, Atmel, SST, Winbond, and ISSI. During his tenure at these companies, he has travelled to 47 countries for marketing and business development purposes. As head of the internet computing segment at SST, he grew the business from $20M to $200M in five years. At Winbond, he was responsible for building a segment marketing team that grew the business from $6M to well over $350M in seven years covering 25+ applications in computing, industrial, automotive, networking, communication, and consumer segments. Manju served as VP of Marketing at ISSI before starting Smiota.

As CHO, Kailasnath overlooks the hardware architecture of products at Smiota. For over 20 years he has focused on developing and integrating cutting-edge firmware and hardware systems into Internet of Things products. Prior to Smiota, he was Co-Founder at Ayantra, Inc. and served as Vice President of Engineering. He has valuable experience in executing Machine 2 Machine technology into applications such as custom fleet tracking devices. He is also co-author of a patent.

As a VP of Customer Success, Jyothi is responsible for driving customer goals, product utilization, business transformation, and revenue expansion by ensuring the engagement, success, retention, and growth of Smiota’s customers.

Jyothi has an action mindset, is always up for challenges, and gets excited by the idea of expansion,and scaling globally. She not only identifies roadblocks and inefficiencies, but also contributes to iterative process improvement initiatives in collaboration with cross-functional teams, ultimately increasing customer satisfaction.

Jyothi strongly believes that we only become more powerful when we empower others. Through her leadership, she enables the team to put their best foot forward. She is extremely result-oriented and proactive in addressing and resolving problems.

Before joining Smiota, she was the co-founder of SmartelligentZ, an educational services company, and she worked as a Sr. Applications Engineer at Atmel and Actel. She was also a part of green initiative organization “Going Green”.

Khurram oversees all technology development and strategy at Smiota. Khurram is an engineer, architect, and entrepreneur with close to 20 years of experience in engineering and product management at leading enterprise software companies such as Workday, PeopleSoft, and Oracle. He joined Workday when it was a small startup without products or customers and helped it grow to a $10 billion+ public company. During his tenure at Workday, he led several engineering teams and also served as senior technology architect responsible for overseeing technology strategy. Khurram has earned several innovation awards and also holds several technology patents.

Warren Porter brings more than 18 years of student housing experience to his advisory role. He started his student housing career working as an Assistant Area Coordinator for Texas Tech University and returned to his alma mater as an Area Coordinator for the University of New Mexico. Warren then ventured into the privatized student housing industry working for Century Development, American Campus Communities, and other private developers. Warren has held various positions of responsibility from General Manager, Operations Specialist, Area Manager, and Regional Manager. He is now the Director of Housing On Campus for AVS at UNLV.

Mike brings a combination of e-commerce operating and investment experience.

He was acting CEO, and CFO, of e-commerce grocer Safeway.com. While leading Safeway.com the e-tailer was ranked #1 omni-channel retailer for customer experience in its category (Fluid), #1 in customer engagement (SimilarWeb), and won a Hub Prize for excellence in brand experience. Following the acquisition of Safeway by Albertsons, Mike led e-commerce for the combined entity, the 2nd largest U.S. supermarket chain with $60 billion in revenue and 2,300 retail locations.

Prior to taking the helm at Safeway.com, Mike led Corporate Development, including mergers & acquisitions and co-founded the venture capital group, at parent company Safeway, Inc.

He began his career as an investment professional, engaging with institutional investors, as an Equity Research Analyst at investment bank Lehman Brothers. Ranked #2 in Institutional Investor magazine’s annual survey of institutional investors.

Mike holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a bachelor’s degree in Finance from Boston College.

John Callan is Co-founder and Managing Director of Strategy Consultancy Ursa Major Associates, LLC , Founder and Chairman of the PostalVision 2020 Initiative, and Co-founder of Postal Pitch. John began his delivery industry career in 1974 by founding Calico Air Courier Service, growing it globally and selling it to rival DHL in 1979 where he became Vice President of Marketing. He spent the next few decades “pushing the postal/parcel envelope” while serving in senior officer positions at DHL, TNT Skypak, Purolator Courier, and a pioneer online shipping start-up, Milestone Systems, before beginning his strategy consulting practice advising USPS in 1997. Under Coopers & Lybrand and PwC, John thought-led projects on the USPS’s Package Services Business Plan, PostOffice Online, and International Business Unit strategy, leading to successful product introductions for Parcel Select, Click and Ship, and Global Express Guaranteed, respectively. John co-founded independent strategy consultancy Ursa Major Associates in 2001 where he advised leading mail and parcel delivery clients on strategic growth opportunities, including Pitney Bowes, FedEx, DHL Global Mail, Neopost, and USPS Office of Inspector General. He also coached many start-ups in the rapidly transforming ecommerce logistics ecosystem on go-to-market strategies. John continues to apply his broad value chain experience and expertise to clients large and small, often providing the unique value of bringing them together. With growing concern for the deleterious long-term impact of electronic communication on mail beginning in 2002, exacerbated by the Great Recession in 2008, John identified a need to stage an industry-wide independent, all-inclusive conversation about reinventing the postal ecosystem. He launched the PostalVision 2020 Initiative and staged its first experimental conference in 2011, followed each successive year by gathering representatives from all across the global postal-parcel-delivery ecosystem, including USPS, its major mailers and shippers, service providers, competitors, academics, unions, foreign posts, and increasingly opportunistic start-ups, in a conversation about the future. Having launched his career as a start-up himself, John has continued to nurture a keen interest in new ventures. In 2017 he co-founded the PostalPitch competition to serve as a launching pad for delivery ecosystem start-ups to meet the greater industry. Successful events have been staged in Geneva and Washington and will soon be held in Hamburg. As a well-known and highly respected postal and parcel delivery industry expert, John has appeared on CNBC, NPR’s Morning Edition and Marketplace, has been interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Kiplinger Letter, Post & Parcel, and E-Commerce Bytes, has authored Op-Eds for The Hill, is a familiar speaker at industry conferences in the U.S and abroad, and has written numerous articles for trade publications. John has served as a Board Director for the Parcel Shippers Association (PSA), ImageWare Systems (NASDAQ – IWSY), Immediate Mailing Services, Inc. (IMS), and Hurricane Island Outward Bound School. He has an BA in Russian from the University of North Carolina where he was a Morehead Scholar.

Rajesh Chaganti is VP of Engineering at Smiota and is responsible for driving technology and software development. He is passionate about building and running resilient large-scale software systems that scale to millions of users. He is also passionate about building, leading, and mentoring high-performing engineering teams.

In his prior experience, Rajesh was Chief Technologist at MediaKind and was responsible for overall cloud strategy for multiple TV platforms. Prior to that, he was Director of Engineering and responsible for building and running a cloud-based TV platform used by millions of TV subscribers worldwide. In this role, he led the Cloud Platform, Cloud Infrastructure, and DevOps teams. His team was responsible for scaling the platform, evolving the architecture to support both public and private clouds, containerizing the platform, optimizing cloud resource consumption, and launching the service for multiple TV operators globally. He was also instrumental in scaling the engineering organization and building new offshore development centers.