Former Flipkart CTO Peeyush Ranjan Joins Meraki Labs as Partner

Peeyush Ranjan, former CTO of Flipkart and a Google veteran, has joined Mukesh Bansal's startup incubator Meraki Labs as a partner.

Based in San Francisco, he will help Meraki expand its presence in Silicon Valley as it focuses on artificial intelligence (AI) and collaborate closely with incubator entrepreneurs to shape their tech and product strategies, according to Ranjan.

"Meraki's focus is to be a moonshot factory for amazing projects, and in today's day, AI is a key component of that," he told me. "My role will include guiding Meraki's AI vision. What kind of businesses should we start, and what are the problems that we will excel at solving?"...not just using AI for the sake of it."

Ranjan said his presence in Silicon Valley, while Bansal is based in Bengaluru, allows Meraki to "connect with global networks and talent."

"With his deep product mindset and engineering leadership, he (Ranjan) will play a key role in building new companies, leading our AI vision, and establishing Meraki's strong presence in Silicon Valley," Bansal stated.

"Peeyush has built many large-scale products from scratch that are used by hundreds of millions of people around the world, and he has a very good sense of emerging tech trends," he added.

As a partner, Ranjan will be involved in ongoing investments for Meraki Labs' portfolio companies.

He will also serve on the board of Nurix AI, Bansal's own AI startup incubated at Meraki Labs. Nurix, which raised $27.5 million in seed funding from Accel and General Catalyst in September of last year, creates custom AI agents for enterprise services such as sales and customer support in the early stages.

Ranjan stated that he would assist Nurix in developing a technical architecture and hiring key leadership positions.

"Nurix is addressing a very specific problem: it is looking to solve for these tasks that are time-consuming for humans, error-prone, and subject to churn. "The entire opportunity for Nurix is to delve deep into business operations and see how AI can be applied," he stated.

Meraki Labs' focus on AI, however, may go beyond enterprise use cases. "For Meraki, it wouldn't be surprising if the next thing we do is focused on consumers," Ranjan stated.

Prior to joining Meraki Labs, Ranjan worked as Google's general manager and vice president of engineering, where he led teams developing AI-powered products such as Google Assistant and parts of the Gemini app.

Bansal, cofounder of leading fashion portal Myntra, has also backed companies such as Groww, Skyroot Aerospace, and former Zomato executive Mohit Gupta's fashion startup Lyskraft via Meraki Labs. He invested with his own capital.