Meet the Crayon Crew
The people who build up the Box
Our founders
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.
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.
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.
Our captains
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Senior Manager, Data Science
Kani has 8+ years of research experience, in academia & industry, in fields such as recommendation systems, graph learning, content understanding and computational linguistics. She leads efforts to diversify the data science team and passionate about using data science to build data products and personalized recommendation systems.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.