BOSTON–TiE Boston announced the addition of two new board members: Anupendra Sharma and Kiran Uppuluri. They replace Thara Pillai and Swapan Jha, whose term recently expired.
Other TiE Boston Board members include Thomas Arul, Shirish Nimgaonkar, Geeta Sreedhar, Venkat Maroju, Zenobia Moochala, Sangeeta Moorjani, and Darshana Zaveri, along with officers Emily Ladd-Kravitz (Secretary) and Asha Dixit (Treasurer) and Anu Chitrapu (President).
With extensive leadership experience, Mr. Sharma and Ms. Uppuluri bring unique expertise to assist TiE Boston’s vision of fostering entrepreneurship in the Boston and New England area. With other board members, they will provide governance over strategic planning and responsibly steward the organization’s goals over a two-year term.
“I am excited to welcome Anupendra and Kiran to the TiE Boston Board,” said Ms. Chitrapu. “They are both successful professionals who have contributed to the success and growth of TiE Boston and I look forward to working closely with them. I also want to thank Thara Pillai and Swapan Jha for their contributions over the last two years. Both of them will continue to support our mission as charter members.”
“It is my honor to serve on the TiE Boston Board alongside stellar men and women leaders. I have always admired TiE’s commitment to entrepreneurship and I look forward to contributing to this amazing community,” said Ms. Uppuluri on being appointed to the Board.
Mr. Sharma added, “While I’ve been involved in operational matters at TiE, working on strategic initiatives alongside a very accomplished group of Board Members, as well as Anu and her team, will be an entirely new and exciting experience.”
Mr. Sharma is Founder & CEO of Axlmed, a digital health company working on improving our understanding of disease. He has a background in venture capital, investment banking and corporate
finance. Anupendra was Senior Investment Partner at Siemens Venture Capital for nearly 12 years investing in the US and China, and worked in Mergers & Acquisitions at JPMorgan, Citigroup and Siemens.
He co-founded several organizations to mentor innovators and entrepreneurs, including the Startup Leadership Program, which has educated nearly 4,000 entrepreneurs in 13 countries who have raised $3.4 billion; MALSI Day, which is an annual celebration of university research in the Commonwealth, the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership at BITS Pilani, and co-created the Healthcare Innovation & Commercialization course at Harvard Medical School that has educated nearly 1,000 MDs and PhDs about the process from ideation to spinoff.
Mr. Sharma holds an MBA from Cornell, MS in Accounting & Finance from Manchester Business School, Masters in Economics and Bachelors in Instrumentation Engineering from BITS Pilani and is an ACMA from the UK.
Ms. Uppuluri is founder and CEO verteXD. She helps businesses reimagine business strategy, customer journey mapping and experience design with a relentless focus on human- centeredness and an intrinsic design thinking approach. Before founding verteXD, she was in an executive leadership role at Citizens Bank where she led a team that created and owned the Customer Experience strategy and roadmap for multi- channel customer experiences; and before that with Fidelity Investments in various senior roles spanning marketing, product management and customer strategy and experience. Prior to that, Ms. Uppuluri spent several years in management consulting with Deloitte, in their Strategy & Operations practice.
Most recently, Ms. Uppuluri was recently the Chairperson for the highly successful TiECON East 2021. She serves as a business mentor at MIT VMS and as an industry mentor at the national level for NSF ICorps. She is also a Design Thinking educator at DesignxRI. She was named in the Top 10 CEOs of 2021 by Industry Era Women Leaders. She was also recently honored with the 2021 TiE Boston President’s Choice Award, for her dedication and contribution to the TiE Community during this past year.
Ms. Uppuluri holds an MBA from University of Maryland Smith School of Business, M.S. from Clemson University and a B. Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.
