Charu Sharma

Charu is a tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. Charu cofounded OsanaSalud, a leading health-tech startup backed by General Catalyst, Addition/Lee Pixel, Quiet Capital and Afore VC. Charu has mentored 250+ startups, and invested in several startups and VC funds. She built two-award winning startups out of her college dorm room before getting recruited by LinkedIn. After LinkedIn, Charu built Nextplay.ai, an HR tech company that serviced Fortune 500 companies. In 2019, Charu was named the AI entrepreneur of the year by VentureBeat and a Top 10 Woman in Cloud by Sheryl Sandberg and Cloud-now.  To pay it forward, Charu founded a global movement Go Against the Flow in 2013 to educate 1 million women to take risks and build their own businesses. Their documentary film was screened all around the world – from the Empire State building in New York to the National Gallery of Singapore. She also produced documentary films Real Moms of Silicon Valley on working mothers (screened at 1000+ locations across 75 countries in 2020) and I Want to Believe (featuring resilient founders of Tesla, Gitlab etc.). Charu is a highly sought after keynote speaker and a published author. She is frequently invited by startup ecosystems such as 500Startups to speak on entrepreneurship, and by companies such as LinkedIn & Splunk to speak to their rising leaders on career growth and leadership. With 5 National Awards, expeditions to all 7 continents and over 600 talks & panels, Charu was enlisted as a "Power Woman" alongside Oprah Winfrey, Sonia Gandhi, and Melinda Gates by Youth Incorporated. Charu regularly features on media platforms such as CNET, Forbes, Inc, Yahoo! finance, ABC7, Huffington Post, Venture Beat, Business Insider among others. She hosted & spoke at 3 TEDx conferences on entrepreneurship. Fun fact: In 2003, Charu was awarded the National Bravery Award by the Prime Minister of India for fighting with goons in a train robbery and saving lives of women, making her a ‘national hero’ overnight. Charu went on to achieve black-belts in Karate and Taekwondo, represented India in Taekwondo in South Korea, and has been an advocate for self-defense training for women. The education board has dedicated chapters to her in the 10th grade English textbook and the 9th grade Hindi textbook in high schools in Maharashtra, India.