Balaji Thiagarajan, who has formerly worked with Google, Microsoft, Uber, Yahoo and other tech titans will be the new chief product and technology officer (CPTO) at Flipkart, the Walmart-owned e-commerce company, its chief Kalyan Krishnamurthy informed employees in an internal email, a copy of which Moneycontrol has viewed.
Thiagarajan replaces Jeyandran Venugopal who quit Flipkart earlier this year to join Reliance Retail.
His appointment comes at a time when Flipkart is strengthening its tech capabilities.
“His (Balaji’s) deep expertise in Al will be invaluable to us as we continue to build a future-ready organisation…(he will have) a strong focus on accelerating Al adoption, advancing our tech architecture to power cutting-edge Al applications, and driving innovation at scale,” CEO Krishnamurthy said in his email to employees.
Flipkart confirmed the developments to Moneycontrol.
Thiagarajan holds nine U.S. patents and has a BS degree in Electronics and Telecommunication from the University of Pune, an MS degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Syracuse University, and an MBA in Finance & Operations from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
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He has over 25 years of work experience. “His experience spans the most significant technological movements of the last two decades, including the rise of cloud and mobile ecosystems, as well as the advent of big data and Al,” the email added.
More recently he was the founder and CEO of Kasu.ai, a company that developed Al strategies to power and automate business processes, in the US.
The latest appointment means that all of Flipkart’s core tech team, including Ramesh Gururaja, Sandhya Kapoor, Bharath Chinamanthur, Amit Sachan, and Gaurav Mathur, will report to Thiagarajan.
He will also take over the role of Bharath Reddy, SVP at Flipkart, who is moving to Walmart, Moneycontrol had exclusively reported earlier.
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