Swapnil Khandelwal

Founder and CEO AlmaConnect

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Swapnil Khandelwal co-founded AlmaConnect on a premise that runs against the grain of open social networking: that the most valuable professional connections are the ones mediated by a shared institution, and that they work better inside a closed network than an open one. AlmaConnect gives universities, business schools and corporates their own private alumni platform, where graduates can find each other for job referrals, career guidance, introductions and mentoring, and where the institution retains the relationship rather than ceding it to a general-purpose network. The model has found its market in Indian higher education in particular, with more than 2,500 alumni networks now running on it, including those of IIM Ahmedabad, several IITs and St Stephen’s College. He built it with Rubish Gupta, a classmate from the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, after an earlier attempt at online tutoring, and took the company through the iAccelerator programme at IIM Ahmedabad’s CIIE incubator.

Career Highlights

• Co-founder and chief executive of AlmaConnect, which trades under the legal entity Alma Labs, alongside chief operating officer Dhruv Sogani and VP of engineering Siddhant Mohan.
• Co-founded the company with Rubish Gupta, a fellow 2009 graduate of DA-IICT.
• Grew the platform to more than 2,500 active alumni networks, used by institutions including IIM Ahmedabad, IIT Delhi, IIT Roorkee, IIT Dhanbad, IIM Indore and St Stephen’s College.
• Raised a $250,000 angel round reported in March 2013, a subsequent pre-Series A, and around $1.66m in total from Emergent Ventures India, IIMA Ventures and 91Springboard.
• Completed the iAccelerator programme at CIIE, the Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship at IIM Ahmedabad.

Professional Journey

Khandelwal graduated in 2009 from the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology in Gandhinagar, a specialist ICT institution that has produced a disproportionate share of Indian software founders relative to its size. His first venture was in online tutoring; the sources disagree on his role in it, with one account describing him as running a startup in that space and Inc42’s profile recording him only as a former employee of a company called Neo Educators, and the question is not resolved.

AlmaConnect followed, co-founded with Rubish Gupta, who had been in the same DA-IICT cohort. The insight was about where trust in professional networking actually comes from. A general social network can tell you that two people are connected; an institutional network can tell you that two people share an obligation. Alumni will take a call, make an introduction or pass on a referral for someone from their own college in a way they will not for a stranger, and institutions had no software to capture that. AlmaConnect built it as SaaS sold to the institution rather than to the graduate, which aligned the commercial model with the thing that made the network work.

Early funding came through the Indian angel ecosystem. The company announced a $250,000 angel round in March 2013 and later raised a pre-Series A, with Emergent Ventures India, IIMA Ventures and 91Springboard among its backers and roughly $1.66 million raised in total — a deliberately modest capital base for a business selling annual software contracts to institutions. He also took the company through iAccelerator, the startup accelerator run by CIIE at IIM Ahmedabad, which is a programme rather than a degree and is sometimes misreported as the latter.

The platform has since grown to over 2,500 alumni networks. Its customer list runs through the upper tier of Indian higher education — IIM Ahmedabad, IIT Delhi, IIT Roorkee, IIT Dhanbad, IIM Indore, St Stephen’s College — and the product has extended from institutional alumni communities into corporate alumni networks, where former employees are treated as a recruiting and business development asset rather than a severed relationship. The company runs from Delhi NCR with a team led by Khandelwal as chief executive, Dhruv Sogani as chief operating officer and Siddhant Mohan, formerly of Engineer.ai, as VP of engineering.

Education

Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology

Bachelor’s, graduated 2009

He also completed the iAccelerator programme at CIIE, IIM Ahmedabad. That is a startup accelerator run by the institute’s incubator and not an academic qualification, and it is recorded in this profile as an achievement rather than as a degree.