Marry internal enterprise data with external data
Our Team

Meet the Crayon Crew

The people who build up the Box

  • All
  • Our founders
  • Our captains
  • Our leaders

Our founders

Suresh Shankaricon-linkedin
Suresh Shankar
Founder and CEO

Suresh is a second-time entrepreneur, and an evangelist of big data, analytics, and digital personalization. His first venture, RedPill Analytics, was acquired by IBM. With a background in sales, marketing, advertising, media, analytics and Big Data, Suresh has been in the industry for 35 years. Long enough to see the transformation of marketing from right-brain to a left-brain pursuit.

Aarti Ramakrishnan icon-linkedin
Aarti Ramakrishnan
Co-Founder and COO

Aarti has 18+ years of experience in marketing, analytics and operations, especially in the BFSI domain.  She enjoys bridging the gap between traditional business and new-age technology, for her clients. She dons many hats – operations, marketing, and client management – while also making sure that Crayon is an eclectic and diverse workplace.

Vijaya Kumar Ivaturi icon-linkedin
Vijaya Kumar Ivaturi
Co-Founder and CTO

Vijaya Kumar (known as IVK) is a leading expert in innovation management and advanced technologies incubation in India. He consults in business strategy and transformation through new age technologies, covering areas like embedded systems, cloud services, big data analytics and mobility.

Srikant Sastri icon-linkedin
Srikant Sastri
Co-Founder and Advisor

Srikant is a successful entrepreneur, advisor and mentor in digital transformation, M&A-based growth strategy, intrapreneurship & CSR. He successfully built, scaled, and sold two large service ventures in India and SE Asia.

Our captains

Lakshmi Narasimhan icon-linkedin
Lakshmi Narasimhan
Chief Product & Technology Officer

Lakshmi Narasimhan is a business leader with 25+ years of leadership experience in building, launching, and scaling products and businesses in digital, marketing, advertising, and media. He was CEO of Network 18 Digital, part of a multi-platform media conglomerate in India. He also co-founded Flooid, a start-up that works with enterprises across sectors to design, develop and deliver digital products. Throughout his career, he has helped organizations build impactful digital products.

Karunakaran Neelakandan icon-linkedin
Karunakaran Neelakandan
VP, Engineering

Karunakaran comes with 26+ years of experience in architecture and leadership across AI, Bigdata Analytics, GPU, ML and DWBI. He has held multiple leadership positions across the Engineering / Analytics department at Walmart Global Tech India, Wells Fargo and more. He has worked across banking, retail insurance, healthcare, telecom, life science and manufacturing verticals. He has managed and led a team of 300+ across geographies. Outside of work, he is also an active member/mentor in WiT-ACE, NASSCOM and GHCI

Vinayak Ganapuram icon-linkedin
Vinayak Ganapuram
VP, Engineering

Vinayak is a seasoned, hands-on tech leader, with a proven track record in building software products from 0 to 1 & scaling from x to 10x multiple times across finance, e-commerce, and travel. He loves working on products/companies with a steep learning curve and looks to push the boundaries.

Mudassar Waseem icon-linkedin
Mudassar Waseem
VP, Program Management

17+ years’ experience delivering digital transformation projects for Fortune 500 clients across domains including Industrial, Automotive, AdTech, Telecom and Banking.

Nagesh Jaladi icon-linkedin
Nagesh Jaladi
VP, Merchant Solutions

Nagesh comes with 15+ years of experience across Mastercard, Google and AT Kearney. In his previous stint, he was Head of Merchant Solutions, APAC at Mastercard across verticals like digital, retail, telco, travel and insurance. He has worked across the Europe, APAC and North American regions on partnerships & partner management, business development and consulting.

Naveen S Pillai icon-linkedin
Naveen S Pillai
VP, Human Resources

Naveen has 20+ years of HR experience across automobile manufacturing, telecom and media sectors. He enjoys partnering with functional leaders to translate their business vision into HR initiatives. Naveen has worked in leadership roles as HR business partner and at strategic levels, successfully designing and implementing talent management, succession planning and people transformation initiatives.

Pratyush Royicon-linkedin
Pratyush Roy
VP, Go-To-Market

18+ years’ experience in Analytics, AI/ML and Big Data consulting to FSS, Retail and Telecom across US, Asia-Pacific & ME with consistent track record of delivering client delight. Experienced in setting up Analytics, GTM and Delivery functions from the ground up.

Vidhyashankar Sriram icon-linkedin
Vidhyashankar Sriram
Domain Leader, Banking & Analytics

15+ years of experience in banking across APAC and EMEA. Expertise in digital transformation, big data deployment for real time smart decisioning, offer orchestration, omnichannel consistency. Embedding analytics, data storytelling and building transparency across delivery channels.

Our leaders

Sales & Marketing
Vinod Narayanan icon-linkedin
Vinod Narayanan
Director, Sales Engineering

10+ years’ experience in sales enablement and delivery of analytics for banking, pharma and e-commerce with exposure to APAC, EMEA, North America markets. He has led analytics initiatives across digital acquisition, digital engagement, customer insights and fraud reduction.

Vinod Radhakrishnanicon-linkedin
Vinod Radhakrishnan
Director, Partnerships

Vinod has 14+ years of experience in data and analytics in financial, telecom, digital and entertainment industries. He has extensive experience in building advanced analytics, data science and business intelligence teams with a focus on actionable insights to drive business decisions. His areas of interest include predictive modelling, customer lifetime value and NLP optimization.

Vidhya Nairicon-linkedin
Vidhya Nair
Senior Manager, Sales & Business Development

12+ years of experience across IT, banking, edtech and fintech sectors. She is building a personalized digital marketplace called Bazaar@maya.ai that is THE channel that will connect retailers to the right customers.

Prashanth Kaleicon-linkedin
Prashanth Kale
Director, Marketing

Prashanth has 16+ years of experience in B2B marketing and brand building. An award winning marketing director with a proven ability to execute top class integrated growth strategies that lead the way in revenue acceleration across BFSI, Financial Services, Telecom, AI and SaaS products.

Program Management
Devaki Gopalan icon-linkedin
Devaki Gopalan
Director, Program Management

18+ years of experience in IT, primarily in delivery management. Her expert skills across program, people, and client management, make her an asset to any team. She has vast experience in mentoring and enabling individuals and building high-performance teams.

Bharath Kumaricon-linkedin
Bharath Kumar
Director, Customer Success

Bharath is a seasoned techno-functional sales and account management professional with 19+ years of experience spanning across sales, pre-sales, business strategy and program management. He has executed several compelling business campaigns, and devised groundbreaking programs to enter new markets, working across a variety of sectors including tech startups.

Shankar Ganesh icon-linkedin
Shankar Ganesh
Director, Program Management

Shankar has 12+ years of experience in building complex data solutions and products. With his tech expertise, he has shown proven results to achieve 10x conversion for large clients. Currently, he leads the platform team at Crayon Data.

Product Management
Karanveer Singh Bakshi icon-linkedin
Karanveer Singh Bakshi
Director, Pre Sales

15+ Years of experience in AI and Big Data solutions to financial & travel sectors across MENA and APAC.

Priyanshu Mishra icon-linkedin
Priyanshu Mishra
Director, Customer Success

With 10+ years of experience, Priyanshu cut his teeth in strategy consulting and has been delivering AI-led analytics for banks over the past 8 years.

Engineering
Shobana Sathyanathan icon-linkedin
Shobana Sathyanathan
Director, QA

Shobana’s experience spans from leading and testing complex applications across different domains in large MNCs to building QA teams from scratch. As an expert in release management, she constantly looks for ways to improve the overall efficiency of delivery process by building robust automation frameworks.

Ragunath Venkatraman icon-linkedin
Ragunath Venkatraman
Director, Engineering

14+ years of experienced Architect & Mastery in Solution Engineering with a demonstrated history of working in IT with Service Industries, Product firms and Prime Distributors/Resellers. Offering an array of skills in software engineering and data engineering platforms, data security & governance, defining data requirements for analytics, platforms for AI/ML data modelling, Product evaluation, delivery. Recognised as a thought leader with expert ability to successfully implement end-to-end solutions for B2B/B2C with micro-service applications involving big data/data lake platforms on cloud to enforce business intelligences and advanced analytics.

Pradeep Kumar Pachaicon-linkedin
Pradeep Kumar Pacha
Director, DevOps

Pradeep has 17+ years of experience in the IT industry, encompassing domains such as banking, healthcare, retail, and insurance, Pradeep has developed a specialized skill set in DevSecOps, Infrastructure, and Automation. His core objective revolves around the seamless integration of security practices within development and operations, the optimization of infrastructure to maximize efficiency, and the automation of processes to drive enhanced productivity.

Borus RJ icon-linkedin
Borus RJ
Senior Manager, DevOps

Borus has 15+ years of experience in security and operations.  He has donned multiple hats in the past – chief security officer and head of IT operations. With an insatiable craving for architecting consistent and reliable infrastructure, he currently leads the DevSecOps team, making sure that Crayon and customer data are safe and secure on public clouds.

Customer Success 
Sandeep Guruvindapalli icon-linkedin
Sandeep Guruvindapalli
Director, Product Management

Sandeep has 15+ years of experience in data science and analytics in the BFSI and fintech sectors. He was integral in launching one of the most successful fintechs in SEA. And played key roles in analytics and data science divisions across companies. At Crayon, he excels in driving growth by uncovering the value of data for organizations.

Srideep Rudra icon-linkedin
Srideep Rudra
Director, Pre Sales

Srideep has 12+ years experience in analytics, primarily in the BFSI space. Working with clients across US, ME & Asia, he has built and led large scale analytics teams to support multi-million dollar portfolios. He is passionate about storytelling through data and visualisation. And a true believer of the Crayon value #ThinkDataCraftExperiences!

Operations
Sethu Ramalingam icon-linkedin
Sethu Ramalingam
Director, Business Operations & Strategy

With over 9 years of multi-faceted experience across sales, business analytics, consulting and operations, Sethu’s expertise lies in streamlining business processes using business intelligence. He strongly advocates that a process driven organization delivers value and efficiency.

Kelly Shia icon-linkedin
Kelly Shia
Vice President, Strategy

Kelly has 9+ years of experience in the strategy and business operations space. As Chief of Staff at Crayon’s Singapore office, she drives company-wide business planning and performance tracking. She has worked in recruitment, economic strategy and the maritime industry. This creative thinker is both meticulous and big picture driven.

Sujee Shalini icon-linkedin
Sujee Shalini
Senior Manager, HR

Sujee has 13+ years of experience in IT recruitment and operations. She is a specialist in talent acquisition across all levels in the tech industry vertical.