anand rajaraman and venky harinarayan

Founders of Junglee Corp.

Anand Rajaraman

Anand Rajaraman is a Web and technology entrepreneur. He is the co-founder of Cambrian Ventures and Kosmix. Rajaraman also co-founded former Junglee Corp. and played a significant role at Amazon.com in the late 1990s.

Rajaraman was born in Chennai, India. He has an MS and a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University and a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science from IIT Madras(Class of 1989).

Career

Together with four other engineers, Rajaraman founded Junglee Corp. in 1996. Junglee Corp. pioneered Internet comparison shopping. Junglee Corp. was acquired by Amazon.com Inc. in August 1998 for 1.6 million shares of stock valued at $250 million. Rajaraman went on to become Director of Technology at Amazon.com, where he was responsible for technology strategy. He 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 almost 25% of all US transactions, and represent Amazon's fastest-growing and most profitable business segment. Rajaraman also was an inventor of the concept underlying Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk.

Rajaraman and his business partner, Venky Harinarayan, co-founded Cambrian Ventures, an early stage VC fund, in 2000. Cambrian went on to back several companies later acquired by Google. Cambrian has funded companies like Mobissimo, Aster Data Systems and TheFind.com. In 2005, the business partners co-founded Kosmix, a website which organizes the Internet by topic. In April 2011, Kosmix was acquired by Walmart.

In addition to acting as a consulting assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, Rajaraman is a special partner to NeoTribe Ventures and publishes a blog called Datawocky, on which he discusses data mining techniques in search, social media, and advertising.

Venky Harinarayan

Venky Harinarayan is an Indian entrepreneur. He is the co-founder of Cambrian Ventures and Kosmix. Harinarayan also co-founded Junglee Corp. and played a significant role at Amazon.com in the late 1990s. Originally from Bombay, India, Harinarayan has a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University and a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science from IIT Madras (Class of 1988). While at Stanford, Harinarayan co-wrote a paper on implementing data cubes with Anand Rajaraman and Jeff Ullman, which is among the top 600 most cited computer science articles over the last 20 years.

Together with four other engineers, Harinarayan founded Junglee Corp. in 1996. Junglee Corp. pioneered Internet comparison shopping. Junglee Corp. was acquired by Amazon.com Inc. in August 1998 for 1.6 million shares of stock valued at $250 million. Harinarayan then became General Manager at Amazon.com, where he worked with Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos to help create Amazon.com's marketplace business. Marketplace is currently Amazon.com's most profitable and fastest-growing business, accounting for almost 25% of all US transactions. Harinarayan also was an inventor of the concept underlying Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk.

Harinarayan and his business partner, Anand Rajaraman, co-founded Cambrian Ventures, an early stage venture capital fund, in 2000. Cambrian went on to back several companies later acquired by Google. Cambrian funded companies like Mobissimo, Aster Data Systems and TheFind.com. Harinarayan also helped to create search advertising startup Efficient Frontier, which was acquired by Adobe Systems in 2011 for $400 million. In 2005, the business partners co-founded Kosmix, a website which organized the World Wide Web by topic. In 2017, Harinarayan became a special partner to NeoTribe Ventures.

unglee.com is an online shopping service by Amazon which enables customers to find and discover products from online and offline retailers in India. Junglee.com started off as a virtual database that was used to extract information off the Internet and deliver it to enterprise applications. As it progressed, Junglee.com started to use its database technology to create a single window marketplace on the internet by making every item from every supplier available for purchase, thereby saving consumers and enterprises time and money. Web shoppers could locate, compare and transact millions of products from across the Internet shopping mall through one window.

Amazon acquired Junglee in 1998, and Junglee.com was launched in India in February 2012 as a comparison-shopping website. Today, it curates and helps search through a wide variety of products like clothes, electronics, toys, jewellery, video games and much more across thousands of online and offline sellers. Customers can browse through millions of products, choose the product and price they like, and then be directed to the seller who is selling that particular product.