Company Leadership
Kiran Narayan, PhD
Founder & CEO
Kiran is responsible for leading the management team at UnitX. Kiran has over 15 years of combined experience in entrepreneurship, project engineering, software development and algorithms development for advanced analytics, simulations and computing. He served as a project engineer for the upstream oil & gas industry in Houston, and has presented several talks at industry & academic conferences Worldwide. He was a Leader of Tomorrow at the St. Gallen Symposium.
Kiran holds a PhD and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from KAUST, and a Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Madras.
Ravi Samtaney, PhD
Co-Founder & CSO
Ravi is responsible for the scientific assessment of projects at UnitX. Ravi has over 25 years of experience in mathematical and statistical modeling, algorithm development and software development for scientific computing. He is a full-time professor and Dean of the Physical Sciences and Engineering Division at KAUST. Prior to KAUST, Ravi was a staff scientist with the Department of Energy, USA, wherein he worked at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab and the NASA Ames Research Center.
Ravi holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Rutgers University, and a Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Bombay.
Ankita Shree
Co-Founder & CFO
Ankita is responsible for finance and human resources at UnitX. Prior to joining UnitX, Ankita served as a Grade A government office in the Indian Internal Revenue Service in her capacity as the Assistant Commissioner of Income Tax at Bengaluru, India. During that time, she was in charge of a 30 member team, and led efforts to audit and scrutinize filings from multi-national companies across several industry sectors. She has also been part of the Indian diplomatic core on official visits to several nations to discuss policies on international taxation.
Ankita holds a Diploma in International Taxation from IBFD, Netherlands, a Diploma in Business Law and Taxation from the National Law University in Hyderabad, India. She also holds a Master’s in Political Science from JNU, India and a Bachelors in Political Science from the Lady Shriram College, India.
Salman Kattan
PARTNER
Salman is responsible for business development efforts within Saudi Arabia. Prior to UnitX, Salman was a startup associate at the KAUST Entrepreneurship Center. In addition, Salman has 6 years of experience in the Haj camps. Salman brings with him insights to the local market and network into various enterprises in retail, logistics & supply chain, and Government entities.
He is a Stanford-certified trainer in Innovation & Entrepreneurship and holds a Bachelors in Industrial Engineering from Jeddah University.
