Srini Koppolu, the former corporate vice-president and managing director of Microsoft India development centre, has been appointed as the chairman of SETU Software Systems (P) Ltd., a company incubated in educational institute IIIT-Hyderabad.

After a 21-year stint with Microsoft, Koppolu left the company a year back to pursue his dream of contributing to the start-up ecosystem and education in India. After leaving Microsoft in October 2010, Koppolu played a leadership role in Hyderabad Angel Network. Koppolu, with J.A. Chowdary, former managing director of Nvidia India, recently invested $350,000 in Hyderabad-based Mojostreet, a location-based mobile gaming start-up.

“His experience in building world-class teams and products will be an invaluable addition to the team and will take us a long way in building a very successful company,” said Prasad Pingali, CEO of SETU.

SETU Software was founded in 2008 by Prasad Pingali and Vasudeva Varma, professors at IIIT, Hyderabad and provides enterprise solutions in the areas of local language search, enterprise and semantic search, social media monitoring and automatic text summarisation. The company counts companies including Samsung, Rediff.com and Manipal Universal Learning among its clients, besides government agencies. The company also supports search in more than 70 world languages through its local language search technology.

“There is a clear alignment between my passion and SETU‘s vision. The company’s strong technology foundation can lead us to many unique business opportunities and enable us to create solutions for education and social empowerment,” said Koppolu, on his new role.