Venky Harinarayan is an entrepreneur and investor. He is a founder of Junglee — a pioneering shopping search engine, which was later acquired by Amazon. He also is a founder of an innovate search and categorization company called Kosmix which was then acquired by Walmart Stores, Inc.. He was a founding investor in Efficient Frontier, which is a leading search and social media marketing company which was eventually acquired by Adobe. Additionally, he created an early stage venture capital firm in 2000 called Cambrian Ventures.

Venky Harinarayan is a notable donor as well as a prominent ChaloGive initiative supporter. He has focused his philanthropic work around enhancing teaching efforts, promoting lead research on data-driven approaches and attracting outstanding young faculty, students, scholars and post doctoral fellows to the institute for his alma mater IIT Madras Visiting Chairs program.

Venky was also named one of the “100 Most Creative People in Business” by FastCompany is 2012, as well as to the “Venture Capital 100” list by AlwaysOn in the same year. Additionally, he is the receipt of the Distinguished Alumni Award from IIT Madras where he earned his bachelor’s degree. He also has a master’s degree in computer science from UCLA, and PhD in computer science from Stanford University.