Anand Rajaraman

Anand Rajaraman serves as a Founding Partner at Rocketship.vc and Milliways Ventures, bringing together his expertise as a serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and academic. After earning his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University and BTech from IIT Madras, he co-founded Junglee in 1996, which pioneered virtual database technology and was acquired by Amazon for $250 million in 1998. At Amazon, he helped transform the company from a retailer to a retail platform and co-invented Amazon Mechanical Turk. His second startup, Kosmix, focused on semantic search technology and was acquired by Walmart for over $300 million in 2011, where he then co-headed @WalmartLabs. As an early investor, his notable investments include being among the first angel investors in Facebook in 2005, along with investments in Lyft, ClearStory, and numerous other successful ventures. At Stanford, he co-teaches a popular course on Data Mining and co-authored the widely-used textbook "Mining of Massive Datasets." His academic work has earned multiple retrospective 10-year Best Paper awards at prestigious conferences. Through Rocketship.vc, he leads a data-driven venture capital approach with investments across more than 20 countries, while also pursuing his passion for sports as co-owner of the San Francisco Unicorns cricket team in Major League Cricket.