The People
VEPL is an education technology start up based in Chennai, India. We are a team of experienced teachers, subject experts, instruction designers, authors, software technology developers, and business builders, all of whom are united in their passion to deliver the best learning experiences to anyone, any time, anywhere.
Management team
Anand Kannan, Managing Director
Anand has a B.Tech degree from IIT, Madras, India, MSc(Engg) degree from IISc, Bangalore, India and PhD from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA.
He has worked with Nokia as part of its Research Center in Irving, Texas for several years as Research Engineer and then as Manager, New Business Development. He also did a short stint at Arraycomm, Inc in San Jose California during its start up days. During his tenure in Nokia he was involved in several projects in Wireless LAN research, GSM and CDMA radio technology, entry-level mobile application development and business model development for low-income markets.
Anand's interests lie in economics, entrepreneurship, management, cognition, computing, communication technology, system development, digital signal processing, algorithm and architecture development.
Yogish Lavanis, Head, Student Facilitation, and Co-founder
Yogish has a B.Tech degree from IT-BHU, Varanasi, India and MSc(Engg) degree from IISc, Bangalore, India.
He has worked in companies such as Tata-Elxsi and C-DoT as Research Engineer, with a particularly long stint at Motorola in protocol engineering, architecture and design for GSM, UMTS, WAP technologies in senior technical and project management roles. At Motorola, he received the Chairman of the Board's challenge award. He has guided and mentored several technical teams towards challenging goals.
His interests are in mobile and cellular communication technologies, system engineering and mobile applications for productive and positive usage in the Indian Market.
Yogish is also deeply interested in the visual arts - photography, painting, architecture and sculpture.
Pavithra Vikram, Manager, Research & Development
Pavithra holds a Masters Degree (MSEE) in Digital Signal and Image Processing from Stanford University, USA and a Bachelors degree (B.E.) from SVCE, Madras University, India.
Pavithra has worked with Intuit in Mountain View, California, as a Software Engineer for their QuickBooks division. She was later with 2Wire in San Jose, as a DSP Software Engineer for their ADSL and VDSL products, and subsequently with C-DOT Alcatel Lucent Research Center, India. Having lived and worked in the San Franciso Bay Area for over six years, Pavithra brings to the company, the Silicon Valley culture of pushing technological boundaries to create great products that change people's lives. She is also passionate about teaching and learning and has worked as a part-time teacher for organizations such as Kaplan.
Pavithra's technical interests include User Experience, Analytics, Visualization, Software Development, Digital Signal & Image Processing, Multimedia, and Pattern Recognition. She also has a deep interest in Etymology, Cognitive Psychology and Pedagogy, and her hobbies include Drawing, Astronomy and Sanskrit.
Pavithra & her team work on constantly improving the technology behind VEPL's online learning platform, keeping it world class.
Ashwin Kumar, Head, Customer Acquisition
Ashwin Kumar Iyer is a lawyer-turned-management professional with various specializations. As a lawyer, he specialized in International Trade Law. A Post Graduate in Financial Management from IFMR, Chennai, he also has a certificate in Human Resources Management from LIBA and certification from JM Morgan Stanley on Financial Risk Management and Diploma in Intellectual Property Rights from WIPO (Paris).
He has worked as research consultant with Business Intelligence Unit of RIL and as Research and Content Manager at Netfinex (an SSI Enterprise). As General Manager for Greater Asia Distributors Sdn. Bhd., a Malaysia-based trading and distribution house, he travelled around Asia and Europe. He was involved in distribution and travel retail of top designer brands such as Gucci, Mont Blanc, L'Oreal, Nina Ricci, Hugo Boss and Adidas.
He co-founded First Finishing School, an ISO 9001:2000 quality company that imparts soft skills training and industry specific coaching for aviation, hospitality, e-learning and language-oriented programs.