Sep 2023 – Present · 2 yrs 8 mos

• Advisory board for Carnegie Mellon Tech Entrepreneurship

Mar 2021 – Mar 2025 · 4 yrs · California, United States

• Backed by Y Combinator, Felicis, Fika VC and SHAKTI, raised 5.35 million at 30 million valuation.
• Startup Vision & Leadership: Pioneered Criya AI, a MarTech AI startup from 0-1 developing MVP with the vision to revolutionize B2B marketing with AI driven hyper-personalization, led to rapid VC-backed growth, delivering 85% cost savings, engaging over 40,000 SMBs at zero CAC (in 2023). Launched successful B2B SaaS product, signing several enterprise contracts (in 2024).
• Product & Team: Recruited CTO and led a lean 15 person high growth engineering, design, business development, customer support & marketing team. Spearheaded Criya's proprietary RAG based AI model, LLM prompt engine and AI Agent workflows to deliver end to end personalized AI driven Campaign marketing in under 60 seconds.
• Investor relations: 4X valuation increase in 6 months with $5+ million raise, backed by top investors like Y Combinator and VCs (Felicis -Shopify, Canva, Notion).
• GTM strategy: Engineered a flywheel with PLG (zero CAC) followed by multi-prong content and event strategy - website SEO, social media, influencer UGC, brand marketing. Led strategic PR & built community on Socials & Newsletter (200K+), and launched CriyaCon - flagship AI conference.
• Revenue & Sales Operations: Founder-led sales, established a repeatable sales playbook, recruited first SDR & AE, trained customer support staff, SMB & Enterprise SaaS pricing.

May 2019 – Sep 2021 · 2 yrs 4 mos

• AI Agent Experiences Platform: Head of Product for PayPal’s Customer Success AI driven Agent Platform Organization, serving 450M+ customers, 33 million merchants and 12K+ internal users.
• Oversaw product strategy, road mapping, build vs. buy assessments, and launch operations, ensuring alignment with strategic business goals.
• Responsible for a multi-year transformation building AI/ML driven product strategy, leading global teams of PMs, engineers and UX, resulting in over $25M operational savings, yielding benefits in YoY productivity.
• P&L: Opex (Reduction) and product KPIs: Adoption, Avg handle time, Self Service containment, LTV
• Cultural Transformation & Team Development: Led a transformation Change Ambassador initiative implementing human-centered design playbook for 40 product management teams across global offices, fostering a culture of product excellence.
• AI/ML Personalization Platform: Pioneered 0-1 Enterprise Decision Platform providing AI & ML based Personalized recommendations. Led MVP adoption across Mobile home page, Loyalty/rewards, Marketing recommendations to SMBs.
• Fraud / Risk Platform: Led multi-year strategy to unify 17 PayPal's core products under next-gen Risk / Fraud Detection Platform leading 17 engineering teams serving PayPal's 450M user base, with ~500M in annual savings.
• Global Initiatives: Led the geo-enablement strategy for markets in India and China, with the multi-tenancy initiative, integrating PayPal Inc. companies such as Xoom, Venmo, and Braintree into a unified CRM.

Sep 2017 – Jun 2019 · 1 yr 9 mos

• Chief Product Owner, Enterprise Services Platforms
• Pioneered product strategy & evolution of the Enterprise Decision Management Platform providing AI & ML based Personalized Experiences & NextGen Marketing recommendations to PayPal's SMB and Mid market Merchants
• Led adoption of next-gen Risk / Fraud Detection Platform leading 17 engineering teams serving PayPal's 250M user base, with ~500M in annual savings

Apr 2019 – May 2021 · 2 yrs 1 mo · San Francisco Bay Area

• One of the earliest Forbes council members - on both Business and Non Profit councils.

Apr 2016 – Sep 2017 · 1 yr 5 mos

• Led Global Product Management for Hitachi's IoT Smart City Software portfolio focused on integrating video, sensors and analytics for public safety customers.
• Led a team of 25 engineers and PMs (in Italy, USA & India) to launch Hitachi's first Video Analytics based IoT Smart City SaaS platform (HVS - Hitachi Visualization Suite)
• Launched Digital Evidence Management (DEM) application in FY17
• Delivered crisp PRDs & Story Boarded entire user experience for HVS & DEM, guided API design to enable 3rd party integrations enabling partners to write apps over HVS, reducing Engineering team's load by 75%
• Guided pricing, branding, collateral creation & PR briefing for Smart City Marketing launch
• Delivered Sales Enablement training to 10+ global Channel Partners, 150+ Sales & Pre-sales execs driving opportunities with HDS's top Public Safety accounts
• Evangelized product vision & demos to customers at ISC West (30,000+ attendees), IoT World (11,000+ attendees), Analysts, Press as well as internally to Hitachi C-suite and executives
• Created Product Management Process Playbook based on Lean Innovation model for the my group

Feb 2015 – Apr 2016 · 1 yr 2 mos

• Led geo-distributed engineering teams in Italy to deliver IoT platform for public safety and smart city market.
• Drove product roadmap, agile release planning, and customer support for strategic initiatives.
• Conducted regular demos, conferences, and internal Hitachi town halls to evangelize the product.

Jun 2012 – Feb 2015 · 2 yrs 8 mos · San Jose, CA

• Led development of Mobile optimization client for VPN customers on Windows & Mac OSx, from conceptualization to field trials.
• Collaborated with global teams to identify deliverables, timelines, and roadmap for product development.
• Created Software Design & Functional specs and led reviews with cross-functional teams for funding the Execution Commit.

Jul 2010 – Jun 2012 · 1 yr 11 mos · Mountain View, CA

• Developed key features on 3G and LTE mobile gateways for Verizon through 2 release cycles, such as Session Bounce and Inter-rat Handover.
• Created call trace infrastructure to enhance field testers' troubleshooting capabilities and improve gateways' debuggability.
• Developed instrumentation to track Memory usage during Scale and Endurance scenarios.

Apr 2009 – Jun 2010 · 1 yr 2 mos · Greater Seattle Area

• Designed an automated UI framework with Test Architect for testing EF on SQL Server with ASP .Net, Winforms, WPF, Azure & Silverlight.
• Led Dev10 Exit Criteria Test Pass, ensuring quality gates were met with SCRUM agile methodology.
• Delivered detailed test plan and suite for EF Data Binding and Self Tracking Entities.

Jun 2008 – Aug 2008 · 2 mos

• Developed a business intelligence based Project Management application used by Program managers to monitor product status with Key Performance Indicators.
• Learnt on the job - C#, APIs for Sharepoint, ASP .Net, XML, SQL Server Integration, Analysis and Reporting Services

Jul 2006 – Jul 2007 · 1 yr · Bengaluru Area, India

• Worked with the Diagnostic & Defect Resolution team in Server Technology on customer critical patches. Developed a perl tool for automated installation and testing of patches on UNIX platforms.

Jan 2006 – May 2006 · 4 mos · Bengaluru Area, India

• Created a “Procurement Portal” for IBM employees over the intranet using C#, ASP .Net, Oracle DB.