Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, November 2025 — C3iHub, IIT Kanpur, a leading deeptech cybersecurity innovation organisation established under the Department of Science & Technology (DST), Government of India, has announced the appointment of Debaprasad Sahoo as its Vice President – Human Resources. With nearly 18 years of diverse experience across strategic HR, talent capability building, organisational development, leadership enablement, and scaling high-performance work environments, Debaprasad brings a strong blend of strategic thinking and execution-focused HR leadership.
In this new role, Debaprasad will lead C3iHub’s people agenda—driving culture building, developing future-ready talent capability, strengthening leadership alignment, and shaping an employee experience that supports innovation, transformation, and national mission outcomes. His approach integrates people-first leadership with a deep understanding of capability development in modern, technology-led organisations, positioning him strongly to contribute to the next phase of growth at C3iHub.
Before joining C3iHub, Debaprasad spent close to four years with DealShare, contributing to talent strategy, workforce capability enhancement, HR operations scalability, and culture-strengthening initiatives. His experience included transformation across HR systems, leadership enablement, performance frameworks, and people policy modernization in a rapidly growing startup environment.
Prior to DealShare, he gained valuable experience at WhiteHat Jr., where he worked on scaling hiring operations, talent management processes, and capability programs aligned with the organisation’s exponential growth phase. His career also includes a year at ElasticRun, where he contributed across core HR priorities including workforce scaling, HR business partnering, and organisational support during a phase of significant expansion.
Earlier in his journey, Debaprasad spent five impactful years at IBM, working in strategic recruitment partnerships, talent acquisition leadership, and delivery-aligned hiring models. Before IBM, he held recruitment and HR responsibilities across Capgemini, Silverlink Technologies, Tech Mahindra and Fulcrum Worldwide, where he built foundational experience in stakeholder management, hiring lifecycle optimisation, business partnering, and HR execution excellence. His early exposure to HR operations across IT and technology environments strengthened his ability to navigate scale, diversity, and transformation-driven organisations.
Debaprasad holds an Executive Programme in Leadership & Management from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, and an MBA in Human Resource Management from KIIT School of Management, Bhubaneswar. His academic grounding, combined with progressive industry experience across startups, large-scale technology organisations, and high-growth digital companies, equips him with a well-rounded leadership perspective—balancing structure, agility, and transformation.
About C3iHub, IIT Kanpur
C3iHub is a National Deeptech Mission organisation established under the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS), funded by the Department of Science & Technology (DST), Government of India) and hosted by IIT Kanpur. The organisation is dedicated to driving innovation, technology development, entrepreneurship, and talent capability building in the domain of cybersecurity and cyber-physical systems.
C3iHub focuses on strengthening India’s cybersecurity ecosystem through vulnerability research, development of defence technologies, translating research into deployable solutions at scale, creating cybersecurity startups, driving industry–academia collaboration, and developing next-generation cybersecurity leaders.
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