Flipkart launches office in Palo Alto
On 12th August, 2016, Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart established an office in the United States of America. Peeyush Ranjan, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Flipkart, on Twitter, mentioned that Flipkart is live in the Bay Area, with a new office having been established in Palo Alto, California. This move of Flipkart is expected to help the company discover new talent from the new region.
Flipkart is an e-commerce company which originated in India. It was founded in October 2007 by two people - Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal. Registered in Singapore, Flipkart holds headquarters in Bangalore and Karnataka in India. It sells over 40 million products across 80 plus categories. In May 2015, Flipkart's valuation was $15 billion. A year later, Morgan Stanley valued Flipkart at $9.39 billion.
Flipkart has 75 million registered users, 10 million daily page visits and 85,000 sellers. Its technology enables 8 million shipments per month.
In May, 2016, Flipkart's rival and another Indian e-commerce marketplace, Snapdeal, launched a data sciences centre in San Carlos, California. According to an official statement, this will "optimize operational efficiencies using data-driven algorithms, data analytics and predictive modelling." Distilling key patterns, consumer preferences and hidden correlations by analyzing a large amount of data by the centre will bring about better planning and forecasting.
"We have set up a Data Science engine in California, home to domain talent, to further augment our efforts in creating a superior customer experience and strengthen our supply chain. Snapdeal is extensively working on data mining through an existing analytics team," said Rohit Bansal.
InMobi, another Indian start-up established its office in San Francisco in the year 2013. India's single food tech start-up, Zomato, did the same in the United States last year. Other Indian companies like the country's Saas leader, Freshdesk, Data Analytics Start-up, Sirion Labs and WiFi solutions platform Mojo Networks have already established their presence in America. Dhiraj Rajaram's Mu Sigma holds headquarters in Chicago.
