Rakuten India appoints Sunil Gopinath CEO

MUMBAI: Rakuten India, a research and development centre subsidiary of Japan-headquartered Rakuten Inc has appointed Sunil Gopinath as CEO.

"I am confident that under his leadership Rakuten India will continue to grow and attract great engineering talent to support Rakuten’s global operations," said Yasufumi Hirai, Group Executive Vice President, CIO and Chief Information Security Officer, Rakuten, Inc in a statement.

Sunil Gopinath joined Rakuten India in 2016 as Senior Vice President of Products and Technology and has led efforts to establish the product development portfolio.

“I’m looking forward to establishing a strong leadership team and a world class product and technology organization at Rakuten India that will play a leading role in developing innovative data and insights driven products for Rakuten’s global businesses,” said Sunil Gopinath. “By accelerating our efforts to hire great engineering and product talent in India, we will drive innovation in the development of global integrated cloud, communications, entertainment and ecommerce services.”

Former CEO Umesh Biradar will shift focus to concentrate on other Rakuten group initiatives in the United States leading the Globalization Strategy Office.

Rakuten India also recently appointed Naren Narayana as Chief Operating Officer of Rakuten India and technology industry veteran, Shreedhar Patwari to the product research and development leadership team.

Gopinath has held senior Product and Technology Management leadership roles in several global technology companies. Prior to joining Rakuten, he held senior product management strategy and user experience development positions at leading ecommerce platforms, Flipkart and eBay, playing an instrumental role building product innovations.

Prior to joining the ecommerce industry, he held senior product leadership positions in global technology companies like Intel, Samsung and Qualcomm.

He holds an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley, an MS in Computer Science from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Mysore.