Sridhar Ramaswamy

Sridhar Ramaswamy
Ramaswamy11703 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
Name	Sridhar Ramaswamy
Birth date	1970s
Occupation	Entrepreneur, technologist, investor
Alma mater	Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Brown University, Stanford University
Known for	Search technology, advertising technology, Neeva

Sridhar Ramaswamy is an Indian-American technologist, entrepreneur, and investor known for leadership in search and advertising products, and for founding a privacy-focused search company. He was a senior executive at Google and later founded Neeva, and has been active with venture firms, academic collaborations, and public advocacy on technology policy.

Early life and education

Ramaswamy was born in India and studied engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Madras before earning graduate degrees at Brown University and Stanford University, where he engaged with research communities linked to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Washington, and Princeton University. His academic formation connected him to laboratories associated with Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, IBM Research, Microsoft Research, Yahoo! Research, Facebook AI Research, and Google Research.

Career at Google

At Google, Ramaswamy led teams responsible for AdWords, AdSense, and advertising products, working alongside groups connected to Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, Sundar Pichai, Susan Wojcicki, and Amit Singhal. His role intersected with engineering organizations that collaborated with YouTube, Android, Chrome, Waymo, DeepMind, and Alphabet Inc.. He managed product and engineering initiatives that coordinated with partners such as DoubleClick, AdMob, Dart, AdExchanger, The Trade Desk, AppNexus, and MediaMath. During his tenure he engaged in strategy discussions related to regulatory matters involving Federal Trade Commission, European Commission, Competition Commission of India, UK Competition and Markets Authority, and standards bodies like IAB Tech Lab and W3C.

Founding of Neeva and subsequent ventures

Ramaswamy left Google to found Neeva, a subscription search startup positioning itself against products from Microsoft, Bing, Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Brave Search, Startpage, and Amazon Search. Neeva emphasized privacy and ad-free experiences competing with platforms such as Meta, Twitter, X and integrations with services from Salesforce, LinkedIn, Slack, Zoom, and Dropbox. Following Neeva's trajectory he engaged with venture capital firms and angel networks including Sequoia Capital, Benchmark, Accel Partners, Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, GV, and Index Ventures. His later advisory and investing activities connected him to startups in search, privacy, and advertising such as Algolia, Lucidworks, Yext, Criteo, OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, and Hugging Face.

Research, patents, and technical contributions

Ramaswamy's technical work spans search ranking, auction design, and ad targeting, with patents and publications in areas explored by researchers at Stanford University, University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, Cornell University, Columbia University, New York University, University of Michigan, University of Texas at Austin, and California Institute of Technology. His contributions relate to concepts advanced by teams at Google Brain, DeepMind, OpenAI, Facebook AI Research, Microsoft Research Cambridge, and IBM Watson and intersect with technologies like PageRank, MapReduce, TensorFlow, PyTorch, Hadoop, Spark, and Kubernetes. Ramaswamy's work in ad auctions references foundational work by Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Leslie Lamport, Jon Kleinberg, Serge Abiteboul, and economic theories from Paul Milgrom, Robert Wilson, John Nash, Kenneth Arrow, and Lloyd Shapley. He has filed patents that relate to systems used by platforms including DoubleClick, AdMob, OpenX, Index Exchange, Sovrn Holdings, and PubMatic.

Public positions, advocacy, and board memberships

Ramaswamy has spoken publicly on privacy, competition, and the role of advertising in online services at forums such as World Economic Forum, TED, Recode Decode, WSJ Tech Live, TechCrunch Disrupt, Web Summit, and hearings involving United States Congress committees on technology and antitrust. He has testified or submitted commentary relevant to regulators like the Federal Trade Commission, DOJ Antitrust Division, European Commission Directorate-General for Competition, and the Competition Commission of India. Ramaswamy has served on advisory boards and boards of directors for organizations and institutions including IETF, W3C, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Center for Democracy & Technology, Internet Society, OpenAI board discussions, Stanford AI Lab advisory board, Brown University Engineering Council, and several startup boards.

Personal life and recognition

Ramaswamy has been profiled by media outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, Forbes, Fortune, Wired, The Economist, and Recode. He has received industry recognition in lists by Business Insider, MIT Technology Review, TIME, Fast Company, CNBC, VentureBeat, and TechCrunch. Personal affiliations link him to academic institutions such as IIT Madras, Brown University Alumni Association, Stanford Graduate School of Business, and philanthropic organizations including Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Gates Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, and The Aspen Institute.

Category:Indian computer scientists Category:Technology company founders