Leadership team

Abhi Gholap

Founder & Chairman

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Abhi Gholap

Founder & Chairman

Abhi is an alumnus of IIT Mumbai and Stanford University Graduate school of Business. He specializes in startups and product management. With over 4 successful startups to his credit as founder, investments in over 9 startups, 14 international patents and an active member of leading angel groups in Bay Area, Abhi handholds startups from ideas to commercialization. Abhi is TiE Silicon Valley charter member and medical advisory board member of Frost and Sullivan.

Over the years, Abhi and the companies he has founded, received a number of awards:

  • 2017: Top 50 Indian Entrepreneurs in USA by Technology Headlines
  • 2016: Inclusion into Cancer Moonshot program
  • 2015: Entrepreneur of the Month recognition by SiliconIndia
  • 2013: Indian Leadership Award for Industrial Development
  • 2012: President’s Gold Lotus National award
  • 2012: Maharashtra State Entrepreneurship Award
  • 2011: RED Herring Asia Business Award
  • 2010: DELOITTE Fast 50 Business Award
  • 2009: Maharashtra State Government's R&D (Innovation) Award
  • 2008: Rajiv Gandhi IT Award
  • 2007: Rotary International Vocational Excellence Award

Abhi is also passionate about films and entertainment with National Gold Lotus award to his debut film project in India.

Prasad Sathe

CFO & Managing Director (India)

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Prasad Sathe

CFO & Managing Director (India)

Prasad is a qualified CPA, CS and CWA, with more than 20 years experience in the IT and Industrial space. His key areas of focus have been Operational Review and Analysis (Project Profitability, Degree of Bench, etc.), Financial Management (Accounts / Audit / Taxation), Legal (STPI, FEMA, etc.), HR, ISO and Secretarial Compliance, thereby contributing to the interests of all stakeholders. He has experience in the Software Field (ITeS), including securing VC Funding, Fiscal Monitoring and Managing Operations of the India Business Unit (Legal, HR, Infrastructure and Admin). He has initiated and successfully implemented the Accounting of Subsidiary Companies on a US-based GAAP (US and India) compliant Package for Seamless Consolidation.

Prasanna Gogate

VP (Projects)

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Prasanna Gogate

VP (Projects)

Prasanna has 22 years of experience in IT working for services, product, captive and startup organizations. He has worked at customer locations in the USA, Brazil & Hong Kong. In his 22 years of IT career, Prasanna has worked at different levels with IBM Global Services, Patni Computer Systems, Misys, HSBC Global Technology to name a few. He has managed teams for both overseas as well as domestic customers.

Prior to joining Optra, he led the product implementation and support for a company in the area of language localization.

Prasanna holds a Bachelors and Master’s degree in Computers from University of Pune, India.

Dr. Punit Kamrah

VP – Business Development

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Dr. Punit Kamrah

VP – Business Development

Dr. Punit has 23+ years in Health Care, Life-sciences, Health Care IT & Pharma industry. He is an Expert in building strategic relations, consultative selling, Strategic account management, client partenr, as well as creating strategic innovative solutions, sales, and BD.

Before joining Optra Systems, Punit has held leadership positions in strategic account and client success, sales, marketing, BD, Operations as well as a practice head to increase top line revenue, productivity & profitability in mid-sized, large product engineering companies as well as startups.

Dr. Punit is an MBA from a top business school (I.I.M-K) & a medicine doctor, M.D equivalent.

Dr. Ashwin Kotwaliwale

Medical Director

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Dr. Ashwin Kotwaliwale

Medical Director

Dr. Ashwin Kotwaliwale MD, PhD, has more than 15 years of experience in the biomedical informatics field. Originally trained as a medical doctor and then transitioned into bioinformatics, Dr. Kotwaliwale has great passion for developing software solutions for the healthcare and life sciences industry. He is deeply involved in technology and the domain side to accurately identify business requirements and provide innovative solutions.

Dr. Kotwaliwale’s research experience has empowered him to look at a problem from a domain focus and then provide an engineering implementation across domain boundaries. He has worked in genomics from the early days of arrays to advanced technologies such as next gen sequencing.

Recently Dr. Kotwaliwale has been involved in cutting edge software applications such as Big Data analytics from both the technology and domain application focused sides. He enjoys coding as well and has experience managing development teams and frontend customer interactions.

Nitin Sharma

Delivery Manager

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Nitin Sharma

Delivery Manager

Nitin is responsible for building and managing delivery teams while setting-up best practices to deliver quality and timely services. Being a certified technology specialist and management graduate, he works in technology as interest and management by habit. With his experience of over 13 years, he helps in making decision in Solution Architecture, Enterprise Engineering and project management with Data Analytics in the space of healthcare and life sciences. He comes with the experience awarded by British Council in the space of automation of curation.

He holds a Bachelors and Masters degree in Computer Science, along with Masters in Management.