Two founders. Two disciplines. One group.

Deepak is Vice Chancellor of SR University, Director of LeadingIndia.AI, and Chairman of EmpowerGlobal Tech AI. His work over the past 25 years has moved between three tracks that usually stay separate: running and building academic institutions, leading national AI policy and skilling initiatives, and producing AI research at scale.

As Director of LeadingIndia.AI, he has built what is today the largest AI skilling and research ecosystem in the country, certifying over 138,000 learners across 939 institutions and partnering with AICTE, NITI Aayog, the Royal Academy of Engineering UK, NVIDIA, and AWS. The initiative is funded under the Newton Bhabha Fund and runs in collaboration with UCL and Brunel University.

His research output includes 130+ publications, an h-index of 24, over 2,200 citations, and more than ₹700 million in funded research. He has guided 21+ PhDs and 35+ M.Tech students, and holds patents in applied AI and machine learning. His group's current research focus spans deep learning for healthcare, assistive technology, hardware security, and large language models.

Before SR University, he was founding Director of the NVIDIA-Bennett AI Research Centre, and Chairman of the Board of Studies and Research Advisory Board for Computer Science at Bennett University. He has chaired the IEEE Computer Society, India Council, and serves as Commissioner of ABET's Computing Accreditation Commission. He is NVIDIA's Ambassador for Computer Vision.

Manuj is Co-founder and Managing Director of EmpowerGlobal Tech AI. He runs commercial operations, engineering, and delivery across the group's ventures. His focus, in his own words, is the discipline of delivery: taking complex engineering programs and making them ship.

His background sits at the intersection of R&D, program management, and hands-on engineering. Over 20 years, he has worked across embedded systems, instrumentation, industrial software, and, more recently, agentic AI workflows at production scale. The throughline is the same: reduce ambiguity, keep programs honest about what ships and when, and build the systems that let small teams do large work.

His current work focuses on the operational side of AI ventures: agentic multi-file workflows for large codebases, rapid prototyping through digital twins, custom monitoring and automation systems, and the hiring, program, and delivery frameworks that keep an AI-native venture shipping consistently. He writes about this work publicly at manujg.com.

At EmpowerGlobal Tech AI, he owns the operating model: how ventures are set up, staffed, measured, and scaled, and how the group's shared infrastructure compounds across them.