About

Aruna Rajan is a seasoned professional with over 23 years of experience in building programmatic intelligence in various industries such as IT, telecom, payments, fulfillment, ads, agriculture, eretail, and fashion. She is passionate about bringing social change by building sustainable enterprises that serve the underserved. Currently, she is a Board Member and Partner at Magasool Agro Pvt. Ltd. and Magasool Agro Foundation, where she plays an advisory role as head of product and manages fundraising and outreach to raise investments for their goals. Aruna works with the founding team to improve customer reach and customer centricity, and in solving an important problem of making agriculture a sustainable source of livelihood. They build technology products in food processing, quality detection and sorting based on computer vision/image processing/ML, and also work with agricultural research institutes to bring science into business through product interventions. Aruna has helped set up for-profit units by studying relative gains in direct marketing and developing safe and verifiable quality marks for agro produce. She makes and raises investments for improved processing techniques, automated processing, and supply chain. She manages relationships with urban retail chains for direct marketing of processed produce and actively seeks investments and grant-raising opportunities, advocating for and socializing the ideas behind Magasool. Aruna is taking a very active role in helping measure produce quality (scientifically) and debunking myths in safe food production, marketing safe food right, branding, and product development. Prior to her current role, Aruna has worked with various startups, building, consulting, and advising on AI components of the main line of software products, building intelligence for scale, interpreting spectra, ML as a service for agriculture and food retail, retail supply chains, and more. She has also served as Senior Director at Myntra, where she led the Data Sciences and Intelligent Software Products team in the fashion industry. They were one of the first groups in the world to train GANs on fashion images to machine generate fashion design prototypes. They have also experimented with a significant collection of machine-inspired designs in production for one of their in-house labels and gauged user engagement with machine-generated content. Aruna holds a Ph.D. in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Bachelor's degree from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani. She has expertise in various tech stacks such as search, web, computer vision, ML