Anand Rajaraman is a serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and academic based in Silicon Valley.

Anand is a Founding Partner of Cambrian Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm. His investments include Facebook (one of the earliest angel investors in 2005), Aster Data Systems (acquired by Teradata), Efficient Frontier (acquired by Adobe), Neoteris (acquired by Juniper), Transformic (acquired by Google), Kaltix (acquired by Google), India Infoline (IPO 2005), YouSendIt, AppNexus, and several others.

Anand was, until recently, Senior Vice President at Walmart Global eCommerce, where he co-headed @WalmartLabs, focused at the intersection of social, mobile, and commerce. Anand came to Walmart when Walmart acquired Kosmix, the startup he co-founded, in 2011. The purchase price was reported in the media to be over $300 million. Kosmix pioneered semantic search technology and semantic analysis of social media.

In 1996, Anand co-founded Junglee, an e-commerce pioneer. As Chief Technology Officer, Anand played a key role in developing Junglee's award-winning Virtual Database technology. In 1998, Amazon.com acquired Junglee for over $250 million. Anand 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 sales now constitute over 25% of all transactions, representing Amazon's most profitable business segment. Anand also is a co-inventor of Amazon Mechanical Turk, which pioneered the concepts of crowdsourcing and hybrid Human-Machine computation.

As an academic, Anand’s research has focused at the intersection of database systems, the World-Wide Web, and social media. His research publications have won several awards at prestigious academic conferences, including two retrospective 10-year Best Paper awards at ACM SIGMOD and VLDB (these awards measure the impact of research, both on academia and industry, over a 10-year period).

Anand co-teaches a popular course on Data Mining at Stanford University. His textbook “Mining of Massive Datasets,” co-authored with Jeff Ullman, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2011. It has been downloaded over 100,000 times and is being translated into several languages.

Anand obtained his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, where he won the President of India Gold Medal for graduating at the top of his class, and his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University. His work has been featured in hundreds of articles in leading national and international publications such as Business Week (cover) and the New York Times. In 2012, Fast Company named Anand to its list of “100 Most Creative People in Business.” In 2013, Anand was named a Distinguished Alumnus by his alma mater, IIT Madras.

Anand has been part of the Big Data revolution from three perspectives:

•     As a practitioner, leveraging Big Data at Kosmix and @WalmartLabs.
•     As a teacher at Stanford, training technologists who work at several leading Silicon Valley companies.
•     As an investor in several companies in the Big Data space.