Satish Kathirisetti – From Startups to Stress Signatures

IIIT Hyderabad’s Satish Kathirisetti is not your run of the mill PhD candidate. The itinerant mechanical engineer walks us through his remarkable three-decade career that founded three profitable MedTech start-ups, a successful telecom IPO and cutting edge mentorship at IIIT-H’s start-up incubator.   

At 56, Satish Kathirisetti is possibly one of IIIT Hyderabad’s more senior PhD student to complete a full circle and return to academia. “My journey through the industry moved me from the trenches of being a software engineer to becoming a CEO in MedTech and telecom industries”, he says simply.  

Over the past 30 years, he has leveraged his tech and executive leadership background to hold pivotal C-Suite roles, including as founding team and then CTO for a Telecom company, co-founding a clinical healthcare venture and two AI/health companies.  At IIIT-H, he brings considerable industry experience to his responsibilities as Head of strategy and resident mentor at CIE and Head of engineering with Bhashini project at Product Labs.  

His current PhD journey in Cognitive Neuroscience with Prof. Bhaktee Dongaonkar at the Cognitive Sciences (CogSci) Lab, adds a refreshing layer to the extraordinary career of the mechanical engineer. As a doctoral researcher, his work explores whether mental-state disorders leave a detectable fingerprint in heart-rate dynamics. 

Sky-rocketing career graph 
Fresh out of college, Kathirisetti joined Intergraph, a prominent software developer in Industrial, geospatial and enterprise 3D Modeling and engineering, considered a most desirable employer in Hyderabad at the time. Later, a strategic move to Tanla Solutions Limited, an early telecom infrastructure developer and equipment builder, saw the stratospheric rise of the founding engineer. In 2006, as CTO, he led the company through a successful IPO, the first in the Indian telecom industry, raising $100M. “At one point, our messaging CPaaS platform was handling over 50% of India’s traffic, routed through our equipment, and was handling billions of messages a day”, he adds.  

His passion was always in healthcare. With his school friend, a computational neuroscientist at Washington University, he co-founded NeuBay, a MedTech startup in the United States with its nerve centre at IIIT-H’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) . “Based on research emerging from Washington University, we worked on a new class of neural networks called Neuro-Bayesian Networks, exploring applications in learning and education”.  

The startup was eventually acquired by SenseAI, the flagship platform for 7Sugar, a digital therapeutic platform for diabetes management. “That acquisition took us deeper into the MedTech space”. He elaborates. At SenseAI, working with endocrinologists, we explored whether machine learning could predict diabetic events based on food intake, exercise patterns, and continuous glucose monitoring data”. The goal was personalized treatment. What normally took doctors several months of titration and dosage adjustment could potentially be achieved in a fortnight. 

Working with hospitals and physicians, he noticed a recurring challenge. Doctors genuinely wanted to follow up with patients but lacked the time. Patients, meanwhile, often felt abandoned after a brief consultation.  

That disconnect inspired his third healthcare startup, Dr. Follo, which focuses on post-consultation clinical follow-ups. The platform helps monitor patients, summarizes information for doctors, and ensures continuity of care without increasing physicians’ workload.   

Five years down the line, an overarching desire to explore opportunities in mentoring and research brought him into CIE and the academic ecosystem. “I became involved with Product Labs, working with Prakash Yalla on research translation efforts and became a part of IIIT-H’s Bhashini project and a Resident Mentor at CIE for start-up incubation”.  

LTRC’s Bhashini initiative looks at Indic language translation for India’s national language-translation mission. The Bhashini Engineering Unit acts as the bridge between research institutions and the national platform. The challenge is to facilitate the research centers to work on building better models, without being overwhelmed with the engineering aspects of ensuring the models reach users like developers and startups, because that is not their forte.  

Kathirisetti oversees the systems that make this possible—sandboxes, benchmarking platforms, leader boards, and deployment infrastructure. “We also conduct workshops, hackathons, and outreach programs to encourage developers and startups to use these language technologies”, observes the entrepreneur who co-teaches a course on Technology and Product Entrepreneurship with Prakash Yalla and Prof. Ramesh Loganathan.  

Startup Founder hits Reset button 
It was Prof. Kavita Vemuri who introduced Kathirisetti to Prof. Bhaktee, three and a half years ago.   

He was formally inducted into his doctoral journey about two years ago. With his advisor Prof. Bhaktee, he works at the intersection of learning, memory, and the impact of stress. His current research looks for identifiable patterns in heart-rate data that can serve as signatures of mental-state disorders. “Digging deeper, we are investigating whether unique heart-rate signatures can help distinguish different disorders and levels of anxiety, OCD symptoms, depression, or even schizophrenia”.  

Over eighteen months, a novel method for identifying these signatures was devised and is presently undergoing clinical validation at the Asha Neuro-modulation Center. “Within a year, we should have sufficient evidence to either validate or disprove the method”, reports Kathirisetti who hopes to see a screening product for doctors evolve out of this research.   

India’s space Odyssey and Kathirisetti connection 
Legacy roots in Kakinada but a true-blue Hyderabadi by domicile, Kathirisetti’s adventurous choices can probably be traced back to early childhood.   

With a B. Tech in mechanical engineering (1989-1993) from Bapatla Engineering college, he joined his father’s alma mater – Madras Institute of Technology for his M.E. in manufacturing automation, with a focus on robotic vision. His father who retired as Director of Defence Research & Development Laboratory (DRDL), had studied aeronautical engineering with Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, that he fondly describes as his batch-mate and room-mate at the institute. This was also where Kathirisetti unearthed his passion for technology.   

Growing up in DRDO’s residential colonies, being privy to discussions around defence research and integrated guided missiles was the backdrop of his formative years.  Today, he shares fascinating tales from those early days with Prashanti his wife, an Executive Director in Deloitte and their son Dr. Gautham, who is pursuing his MD in Anaesthesiology.  

What drove his choices? 
Neuroscience and brain-computer interfaces always fascinated the engineer. He believes that unlike many fields where you are expected to stay within your original discipline, Cognitive Science encourages diversity of expertise. “Whether you are from physics, biology, psychology, or engineering, there is room to contribute. That openness was extremely attractive to me. It was Providence that I ended up in IIIT-H that has a robust Cognitive Sciences department, which is in the same direction that I wanted to go in”.  

Mechanical engineering exposed the visual thinker to concepts like kinematics, vibration systems, motion analysis, and dynamic systems that he applies to physiological data. That interdisciplinary approach appears to be yielding interesting results. “I am a very broad specialist with a bird’s eye perspective of how different domains can be integrated, to build a product. For my doctoral research, I hope to narrow my focus to understand how stress impacts memory and learning”, he adds.  

Life at IIIT Hyderabad 
Depending on his mentoring commitments, Kathirisetti divides time between Product Labs and CIE. While juggling teaching duties and a packed schedule, the PhD student makes time for classes, exams and earning course credits. IIIT-H’s Annual R&D Showcase made a strong impression on Kathirisetti. The overwhelming response, the calibre of research, poster presentations and the solutions focus, demonstrated the depth and range of the embedded research culture.   

“Wildlife photography is my biggest passion”, remarks Kathirisetti who straps on his gear and heads for wildlife reserves and tiger habitats across India, every few months. Science fiction and Wodehousian humour have shifted to reading choices in cognitive science, psychology, mental health, Hindu philosophy and scriptures for the voracious reader. After several failed attempts at meditation, his PhD research now demonstrates the structural changes in the brain resulting from sustained meditation practice.   

As a startup founder, the off switch is rarely used. Your customers, employees, and products remain top responsibility, he points out. “Fortunately, I have always engaged in deeply meaningful work that genuinely interests me. It does not feel like an intrusion into your life. More broadly, Product Labs is an exciting place because it sits at the intersection of research and real-world impact. I enjoy looking at research and asking – What can this become? How can it help people? What product or solution can emerge from it? That process of translating ideas into impact continues to excite me”.   

June 2026