Poonacha Machaiah

Co-Founder and CEO, JIYO, Chief Strategy Officer, The Chopra Center

Poonacha Machaiah has over 20 years of global experience as a successful serial entrepreneur and business leader in Fortune 100 companies. Poonacha is among the new breed of emerging social entrepreneurs who are using approaches from the commercial world and employing technology to tackle social and environmental problems. Today he is levering his vast global experience and technology domain expertise to bring to communities transformative educational solutions and ubiquitous access to the masses via mobility. Poonacha has co-founded “Jiyo” a wellbeing platform along with internationally renowned physician and author Deepak Chopra M.D. He is founder the founder and CEO of ‘ABOVE – A Bunch of Versatile Entrepreneurs’, a company he had founded in 2008. ABOVE is a company that has delivered industry-leading solutions in the Education, Mobility, Media and Entertainment segments. ABOVE has launched one of the pioneering Social TV/collaboration platforms TangoFX and recently launched ABOVE Learning Platform.

Poonacha is also the co-founder of the social enterprise ‘WeightLess Project’, a global movement to address the challenges that plague our communities i.e. lifestyle disorders related to obesity/overweight and hunger/malnutrition. He was instrumental in the founding of India’s leading social media startup along with internationally acclaimed film director Shekhar Kapur and Oscar award winning music composer AR Rahman. During his tenure as CEO, Qyuki was been voted as one of India’s coolest startups (Business Today) and also featured in Fortune (India) and Fast Company. Through the majority of his career, he has held senior leadership positions in Global Sales & Business Development with leading MNC’s like Sasken, Motorola, Visionael, Iridium, and Dimension Enterprises – a leading Internet Data Center services startup in the Washington DC area, which was then acquired by Nortel Networks in 2000. He is on the advisory board of Chopra Foundation and International mentor at XMedia Lab, an internationally acclaimed digital media think tank. Prior to his return to India in 2007, he has been an active member of the Vienna Volunteer Fire Department and Joy of Sports in the Washington DC area. Poonacha holds an MBA from the College of William and Mary in Virginia and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Engineering from the B.M.S. College of Engineering in Bangalore, India.