Signifyd doubles down on innovation, hiring two industry veterans to scale up product and machine learning with the support of a new global R&D center in Europe

 

SAN JOSE, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Signifyd, further fueling its technical prowess in the field of e-commerce, has hired two stars from the ranks of product and data science.

Signifyd, further fueling its technical prowess in the field of e-commerce, has hired two stars from the ranks of product and data science.

The company has appointed Prasad Gune as senior vice president in charge of product and Swami Vaithianathasamy as vice president of data science, two highly-regarded technical veterans whose addition reinforces Signifyd’s growing momentum – particularly when it comes to the application of data science and engineering.

Before joining Signifyd, Gune was senior vice president for product at OpenTable, leading the global product vision, strategy and development for all consumer and restaurant products and experiences. Prior to OpenTable, he spent seven years at LinkedIn, serving as product lead for LinkedIn Recruiter, building it from its infancy into LinkedIn’s flagship monetization product within the Talent Solutions business. Prior to LinkedIn, Gune held senior product management roles at Oracle and Siebel Systems as well as various consulting roles at Bain & Company.

Vaithianathasamy joins Signifyd from Google, where he was head of payments data science and payments risk quality. He had served as the team lead for risk machine learning. Prior to Google, he was the director of global risk solutions at PayPal, where he was responsible for managing all the payments risk and credit models, a position that Vaithianathasamy rose to after serving as PayPal’s senior manager of risk detection, manager of decision management and senior risk modeler.

“Signifyd’s immense growth has enabled us to expand our teams in a very dynamic way,” said Signifyd Co-Founder and CEO Raj Ramanand, adding that the number of customers and protected orders have doubled every year since 2014. “Prasad and Swami are two of the most experienced technology veterans in the business. Their expertise will help drive innovative products that are necessary to help our merchants protect their e-commerce experiences.”

Ramanand said that given e-commerce’s momentum, entering 2019 it was clear that Signifyd must deepen its investment in product innovation in order to maintain its position as market leader – more than 250 million consumers transacting within the Signifyd Commerce Network across the globe, projected to exceed $100 billion in annual GMV processed in 2019.

“That growth, while attesting to the accelerating market adoption of our technology, creates a continuous challenge for engineering to ensure not only the reliability but also the continuation of innovating in our industry. We’re not satisfied with the status quo,” Ramanand said.

To support the ongoing growth of the product organization Signifyd opened a global R&D center in Europe which puts the company in an ideal position to serve its global markets and tackle the variety of fraud challenges that different regions of the world present. The center will house a team of top engineers driving Signifyd innovation globally, while supporting teams around the world.

As he takes on product leadership, Gune intends to apply the experience he garnered during his tenure designing products for the enterprise. He is looking to further Signifyd’s ability to help customers receive memorable buying experiences while avoiding false declines or having their orders delayed by fraud reviews.

“True innovation isn’t doing something cool for the sake of it; rather it’s using technology to serve our users’ needs,” Gune said. “We have already started extending the guaranteed fraud protection category out to meet the needs of our mid-market and enterprise customers. And in the next few years, we are going to continue pushing the boundaries of what is possible.”

Vaithianathasamy, who brings a wealth of experience from the world of data and payments to Signifyd, said he intends to make increased use of advanced machine learning and associated technologies to bolster the company’s technical arsenal to better attack fraud.

“Fraudsters are very smart and motivated, so we need great tools to remain ahead of them,” he said. “That’s why I found so much inspiration when I looked at what Signifyd is doing – and where it can go. We have an enormous amount of data and it’s something we can use not only to reduce fraud but also to protect the buying experience our merchants provide, while improving their conversion rates.”

With the transformation brought upon by machine learning, big data and AI, Signifyd is doubling down on its commitment to invest in unique ways to develop and deploy tools that solve complicated e-commerce issues. And with Vaithianathasamy and Gune taking charge of their respective realms, Signifyd is pushing ahead to develop leading-edge innovations that represent new ways of using data to solve pressing customer
problems.