Management


Gopalan Nair, CEO & CTO, G4 Matrix Technologies (Principal Investor and Founder)
Dr. Nair has over a quarter century of experience in hardware, software and system designs related to communications and signal processing. He was with Intel Corporation, USA where he had sixteen years of senior technical and management career. Prior to joining Intel, he held leadership positions at Gandalf Data Limited, Ottawa, Canada, and Indian Space Research Organization, India. He also served as an Adjunct Professor at Arizona State University, USA. He has several publications and holds 6 US Patents. Dr. Nair received his B.Sc(Engg.) in Electronics and Communications from University of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram, India, with First Class Honors and First Rank in the University. He received his M.Eng (Electronics) from Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada and Ph.D (EE) from Arizona State University

Vinod Menon, Chief Operating Officer
Vinod Menon has over 20 years of experience in Sales and Marketing in medical, industrial and institutional selling and also as an entrepreneur. Most recently, he headed the business development operations of Centiti Digital Systems, a Bangalore based Pattern Recognition Company. As the Director of Marketing for C4Fabricators and Engineers, a Kochi based ship-building firm, he was successful in extending their business operations to other areas like plant and machinery erection, by winning deals worth several millions from large industry groups.

Mr. Menon had been and continues to be a business consultant to several companies in India and abroad, Atwin Engineering (Singapore), Shimita Systems (Mumbai), Printdreams AB (Sweden), and3D Media (Brazil) to name a few. He had been advising and helping the companies develop business, product development manufacturing strategies.

His list of clients and associates include leading companies like Hindustan Liver, Colgate, Cadbury's, Glaxo, Novartis, Birla Cements, Tata Motors, Intel, Zee TV and Star Networks. He also worked with leading advertising agencies like Lintas, O&M and FCB Ulka for brand promotional activities related to promotional premiums.

Narayanan Bhattathiripad, Vice President, Engineering
Narayanan has over two decades experience in technology development, engineering management and corporate management. He started his professional career at Processor Systems India (PSI), one of the pioneering companies in the Indian computer industry, where he was involved in the design and a development of state of the art networking equipment using Token Ring, Ethernet, ATM and SONET technologies. He led teams developing software systems ranging from device drivers, network protocol stacks, network management software and large ATM switches.

In 1999 Narayanan co-founded Mistral, an embedded systems solutions company in Bangalore, India. At Mistral, as Vice President and CTO, he built and led a team of over 180 engineers working in various embedded technology domains ranging from multimedia, navigation, automotive infotainment and consumer electronics. In addition to the technology ownership, he was also directly responsible for the P&L of the embedded software team at Mistral. He spearheaded the design and development of next generation car Infotainment reference platforms, which have since been customized for several Tier 1 and Tier 2 automotive suppliers in Europe and Asia. With focus on quality, timeliness and customer commitment and long term goals, he led the company through ISO9001:2000 and CMMi certifications, and as a leader in embedded systems outsourcing in India.

Narayanan holds a degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering from Calicut University in Kerala and completed Executive General Management Programme from Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. He is also holder of a patent Cells-in-Frames technology.

Sharma Upadhyayula, Director, Product Marketing and Business Development
Sharma has over 15 years of product development, business strategy and marketing (Product & Technical) experience in software, hardware and systems solutions. Before joining G4Matrix Technologies, he was with Corrent Corp. (a network & data security solutions startup) as a Product Marketing Manager where he successfully brought 3 silicon and 2 board solutions to market. Prior to Corrent, he was with Intel, in a business development role, as IXA Developer Relations Manager involved in building an ecosystem for Intel’s Network Processor products. Prior to the business development function he was in a Technical Marketing role involved in bringing new technologies to the market. Before Intel, Sharma was involved in software product development at Sybase, S3 Systems (startup) and IBAX healthcare systems. Sharma has a M.S. in Computer Engineering from University of South Carolina and M.S. in Management & Engineering from M.I.T Sloan School of Management.