Venky Harinarayan

Entrepreneur

Venky Harinarayan (@venky13) co-founded Kosmix with Anand Rajaraman with the vision of connecting people to information that makes a difference in their lives. Upon the acquisition of Kosmix by Walmart, Venky serves as SVP Walmart Global eCommerce and Head of @WalmartLabs. Along with Anand, Venky is a founding partner at Cambrian Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm whose investments include Aster Data (Teradata), Neoteris (Juniper Networks), Kaltix (Google), Transformic (Google), Gradiance and Efficient Frontier. Venky serves on the board of directors at Efficient Frontier and until recently TutorVista (Pearson, LLC).

Anand and Venky are active angel investors and are among the handful of preferred angel investors in Facebook in 2005.

Venky and Anand co-founded Junglee, the company that pioneered Internet comparison shopping, in 1996. After Amazon’s acquisition of Junglee in 1998 for over $250 million, Venky helped create Amazon.com’s marketplace business, which today accounts for over 30 percent of Amazon.com’s unit orders. Venky and Anand are also co-inventors of the concept underlying the Amazon.com Mechanical Turk technology.

Venky earned his doctoral degree in computer science from Stanford University. He holds a master’s degree in computer science from UCLA and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.