Nov 2017 – Mar 2018 · 4 mos · Menlo Park, CA

• Working on our next startup. Stay tuned. :)

Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 · 0 mo · Sunnyvale, California

• Revcontent is among the largest native advertising content recommendation networks in the world, reaching 1.5 Billion users monthly. Its publishers include Forbes, Newsweek, Atlantic, Reuters, IBN.
• Joined Revcontent after Revcontent’s acquisition of my startup, Rover.
• TechCrunch - https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/23/revcontent-acquires-rover/
• Forbes - https://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2017/02/24/revcontent-to-conquer-the-content-discovery-market-through-rover-acquisition/#3cf476ca10fe
• Lead efforts to integrate Rover’s Machine Learning based personalized content recommendation technology with Revcontent’s systems for (a) CTR Prediction and eCPM maximization (b) Improving ad quality (c) offering advertisers audience interest targeting capability to target over 3000 user interests (d) offering publishers personalization tools to maximize user engagement and sessions lengths.

Jan 2012 – Jan 2014 · 2 yrs

• Flipora is a machine learning based web app that recommends content tailored specifically to your interests.
• Flipora grew to about 40 million registered users. We rebranded Flipora to Rover when we launched our mobile apps in 2015.
• Flipora was named by Forbes in their Top 5 Apps for Content Discovery alongside FlipBoard, Prismatic, Nuzzel & Pinterest (source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnrampton/2015/01/27/five-new-apps-challenging-facebook-and-twitter-for-content-discovery/)

Jan 2008 – Jan 2016 · 8 yrs · Sunnyvale, CA

• Rover (http://www.roverapp.com) is a personalized content recommendation technology company that I co-founded. Rover helps people discover content they love, that they never knew existed from a wide variety of over 15,000 topics. The recommendation engine uses machine learning to learn a user's fine grained interests through content a user engages with while being respectful of a user's need for privacy. Rover also connects you to other people who are influential in topics you care about and helps you discover other people with similar interests.
• Rover was acquired in Feb 2017 by Revcontent which is one of the largest and fastest growing content recommendation networks in the world. Some nice press coverage about the acquisition.
• TechCrunch - https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/23/revcontent-acquires-rover/
• Rover was featured by Apple on the iOS App Store and is #1 in the News Category (Best New Apps) for the iPhone.
 https://medium.com/@roverapp/we-have-reached-a-milestone-a6644150f09a#.7esev5xfg
• I Co-founded Rover, raised over $6 Million in Venture Capital, hired a stellar team of engineers and designers, negotiated multiple business partnerships, drove different aspects of the product, and helped generate over $5 Million in revenues before its acquisition by Revcontent.
• Investors:
• Gokul Rajaram - Creator of Google AdSense, Facebook, Square
• Barney Pell - Founder & CEO of Powerset (acquired by Microsoft Bing)
• Munjal Shah - Founder & CEO of Like.com (acquired by Google)
• Anil Dharni - Co-founder of Funzio (acquired by GREE).
• Mayank Bawa - Founder & CEO of Aster Data
• Ilya Fushman - Head of product at DropBox, Index Partners
• Tim Draper - Draper Fisher Jurvetson (investors in Tesla, Skype, SpaceX, Twitter Hotmail etc)
• Shariq Rizvi - Director of Ads, Twitter
• Stephen Oskoui - Venture Partner at Founders Fund
• Labrador Ventures
• Band of Angels
• Amidzad Partners & others

Jan 2008 – Jan 2011 · 3 yrs

• Infoaxe was a Web History Search Engine that lets you automatically get back to content browsed in the past without the hassle of bookmarking. We raised seed funding of $3.9 Million from multiple prominent Angels and Silicon valley VCs who backed companies like Skype, Baidu, Hotmail, Tesla, SpaceX, Twilio, Twitter etc.
• Infoaxe reached 7 Million users on the Web with it's browser addons for Firefox, IE & Chrome.
• http://techcrunch.com/2008/11/17/infoaxe-records-your-browsing-sessions-lets-you-search-your-web-history/
• We also launched a real-time search engine in 2009/2010, which exploited anonymized aggregate web browsing history data of all our web history browser add-on users to quickly identify fresh and popular content that more traditional authority signals like PageRank were then slow to identify and promote.
• Ours was one of the earliest search products in the industry that exploited content freshness and current content popularity for search engine ranking. In side-by-side demos alongside Google/Yahoo/Bing at that time, our search ranking did better on search queries where freshness of results was paramount.
• We rebranded the company from Infoaxe to Flipora, when we decided to take our personalization technology for search to the content discovery market instead, since the latter was a much more wide open market then and still remains comparatively unsolved today.

Jan 2007 – Jan 2008 · 1 yr

• Invented a new fast, efficient, sparse multiclass Support Vector Machine.
• Raised categorization accuracy from about 12% to 90% on a taxonomy with many thousands of categories.
• 10x faster training and prediction, 500x more compact models with no accuracy loss.