About

Rahul Kulkarni is a seasoned technologist and co-founder of DoNew, a social enterprise that helps organizations achieve moonshot technology innovation. He is currently serving as the Chief Technologist at Samagra, a mission-driven governance consulting firm that works with state and national bureaucratic leadership to solve complex governance problems in areas spanning education, skilling, employment, service delivery, health, agriculture, amongst others. Rahul's expertise lies in building open-source, population-scale software to help power the next generation GovTech infrastructure. Over the past 6 years, Rahul has helped build and deploy over 20+ open-source based products within the government used by millions of users. Prior to Samagra, Rahul co-founded DoNew with Vihari Komaragiri, where he played the role of fractional CPO or CTO and mentor to the founders. Rahul has helped kickstart and/or transform teams at over a dozen startups, captives, and consulting organizations. Rahul's experience includes setting up startup teams from scratch for an offline retail analytics startup in Bangalore, defining technology architecture and roadmap for a bank in Indonesia, and executing projects at 20% time and cost for state governments in India. Before DoNew, Rahul served as the Chief Product Officer at Sokrati, an ad technology startup that was eventually acquired by Dentsu-Japan. He led product and engineering teams to build out an ads platform that combines real-time big data analytics with user psychographics. He launched personaAds and real-time bidding on Facebook Exchange and helped scale search and social ads platform to 100x growth in advertisers, tens of terabytes of data processed multiple times a day with hundreds of servers. Rahul helped establish teams and processes across business strategy and operations, human resources, marketing in addition to product and engineering in different phases of growth. Rahul's education includes an Executive Program from Google Marketing Academy - INSEAD Singapore, a Diploma in Indian Cyber Law from Government Law College, a Master of Science (MS) in Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, and a Bachelor of Engineering (BE) from VJTI. Rahul's tech stack includes infra, AI, Senior Software Engineer, product manager, Big Data, and Search. Rahul has 22.20 years of relevant experience in the industry.