Anand Rajaraman

Anand Rajaraman (@anand_raj) is a serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and academic based in Silicon Valley. 

Anand is a Founding Partner of Milliways Ventures, a venture capital fund focused on early-stage technology companies. Prior to starting Milliways, he was Senior Vice President at Walmart Global eCommerce, where he co-headed @WalmartLabs, focused at the intersection of social, mobile, and commerce. Anand joined Walmart when when Walmart acquired Kosmix, the startup he co-founded. 

In his VC avatar, Anand is a Founding Partner of Cambrian Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm. Anand's investments include Facebook (one of the earliest angel investors, in 2005); Kaltix (acquired by Google); Transformic (acquired by Google); Neoteris (acquired by Juniper); India Infoline (IPO 2005; INDIAINFO); Facebook; Efficient Frontier; Aster Data (acquired by Teradata); Mobissimo; The Find; and Chaupaati. His Board Member roles include Aster Data, Chaupaati, Transformic, Kosmix, and Gradiance.

Prior to founding Cambrian in 2000, Anand was Director of Technology at Amazon.com, where he was responsible for technology strategy. Anand helped launch the transformation of Amazon.com from a retailer into a retail platform, enabling third-party retailers to sell on Amazon.com's website. Third-party transactions now account for over 25% of all US transactions, and represent Amazon's fastest-growing and most profitable business segment. Anand also is a co-inventor of Amazon Mechanical Turk, which pioneered the concepts of crowdsourcing and hybrid Human-Machine computation.

Anand came to Amazon.com in 1998 through the $250 Million acquisition of Junglee, an Internet pioneer that he co-founded in 1996. As Chief Technology Officer, Anand played a key role in developing Junglee's award-winning Virtual Database technology.

 

As an academic, Anand’s research has focused at the intersection of database systems, the World-Wide Web, and social media. His research publications have won several awards at prestigious academic conferences, including two retrospective 10-year Best Paper awards at ACM SIGMOD and VLDB (these awards measure the impact of research, both on academia and industry, over a 10-year period).

Anand co-teaches a popular course on Data Mining at Stanford University. His textbook “Mining of Massive Datasets,” co-authored with Jeff Ullman, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2011. It has been downloaded over 100,000 times and is being translated into several languages.

He obtained his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, where he won the President of India Gold Medal for graduating at the top of his class, and his MS and PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University. Anand has been featured in articles in Business Week, the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and other leading national publications. In 2012, Fast Company magazine named Anand to its list of “100 Most Creative People in Business.” In 2013, Anand was named a Distinguished Alumnus by his alma mater, IIT Madras.

Anand can be contacted at: datawocky AT gmail DOT com.