Ashhar Farhan
Co Founder Lamakaan
Ashhar Farhan has 30 years’ experience as an entrepreneur and 14 years’ experience as an angel investor and investor in ESDM / Nano-Electronics. At the age of 14, he became the youngest person to get an amateur radio license in India in 1980. He started his first venture at the age of 16, making digital token displays for Indian Railways. In 1986, he joined Integrated Data Systems as a part-time design engineer while still a student and built a paged memory system for the BBC micro and then a Point of Sales terminal based on it. In 1987, he wrote the first antivirus for the Brain Virus that was infecting floppy boot discs. In 1989, he started Computer Corporation and wrote an Urdu Composing System to address the problems of Urdu Publishing. Until then, all the Urdu newspapers, magazines and books where calligraphed by hand in the absence of any typesetting or publishing system. In 1998, he launched the world's first commercial VOIP service, hotfoon.com, as a network of peer to peer PC-based software gateways and VOIP clients that rapidly expanded to half a million customers and terminations in 14 countries. In 2001, he co-founded the Hyderabad chapter of TiE. In 2003, he started Phonestack technologies to productize the emerging VoIP technologies and provide call metering, switching, routing and business services to VoIP operators. In 2004, he designed the popular open source two-way radio BITX20 that is now a standard for all radio experimenters. In 2010, he established Lamakaan the open cultural center that has been the central place for startups, arts and cultural activities in Hyderabad. It is listed among the top 10 places to visit in Hyderabad by Conde Nast, NatGeo, etc. Lamakaan has also hosted the Startup Saturdays for the last five years. In 2015, he co-founded the Daana Network to bring the produce of the small organic farmers directly to the end consumers, helping to reduce their financial distress. In 2015, he started working on high performance tactical and commercial two-way radio systems with the launch of www.hfsigs.com.In 2018, he cofounded Exseed Space (also known as Satellize), India's first private space company that has launched two satellites through Space-X and ISRO. He is a partner in Exseed Electron Fund, India's only venture fund that concentrates on investing in sectors that are of strategic interest to India.
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