ThoughtSpot Appoints Former Salesforce Executive as Its New CEO

Ketan Karkhanis, whose more than a dozen years at Salesforce included leading product development for the company’s Einstein Analytics, fills the role that has been vacant since former CEO Sudheesh Nair left in March.

ThoughtSpot has named former Salesforce executive Ketan Karkhanis (pictured) as the data analytics company’s new CEO, filling the senior executive position that has been open since Sudheesh Nair resigned in March.

ThinkSpot, which recently said it saw 40 percent growth in its software-as-a-service offerings in fiscal 2024, said it will look to Karkhanis to continue the company’s momentum in competitive data analytics and business intelligence.

“The ThoughtSpot board believes Ketan is the right leader to help ThoughtSpot leverage its core innovation and capture the massive market opportunity that lies ahead in AI-powered analytics,” ThoughtSpot co-founder and executive chairman Ajeet Singh said in a statement. announced the appointment of Karkhanis.

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On February 26, ThoughtSpot announced that Nair, who had been the company’s CEO since August 2018, had “chosen to resign” as CEO. Nair left the company in March. his LinkedIn page. Neither the Feb. 26 announcement nor a statement gave a specific reason for his departure. March 15 blog post Titled “ThoughtSpot’s Next Chapter” by Singh.

During the search for a new CEO, the company was led by a CEO office led by Singh and including Chief Development Officer Sumeet Arora, Chief Financial Officer Mohit Daswani, and Chief Revenue Officer Jeff Depa.

ThoughtSpot has become one of the leading companies in crowd data analytics and business intelligence with its on-premises, cloud and embedded analytics products. In recent years, the company has been expanding the AI ​​capabilities of its software, launching the ThinkSpot Sage AI-based search tool.

ThoughtSpot listed CRN Big Data 100 And CRN AI 100. This year, the company was listed as a leader in the Gartner Data Analytics and Business Intelligence Magic Quadrant report.

“Over the past six months, ThoughtSpot has made significant progress in accelerating its product roadmap, delivering GenAI-driven value to customers moving away from legacy visualization platforms, and shifting its focus to resilient growth at scale, all of which has set the table for our next goal.” CEO,” Singh said in the statement announcing Karkhanis’ appointment.

Karkhanis spent more than 12 years at Salesforce, working for two terms at the cloud application giant. Since April 2022, he has served as vice president and general manager of the Salesforce Sales Cloud business, which generated $7 billion in revenue in the company’s last fiscal year.

From May 2020 to April 2022, he served as chief operations officer at Turvo, a developer of supply chain management and collaboration software, which was acquired by Lineage Logistics in June 2022. His duties there included leading the company’s product, engineering and customer success teams. to the LinkedIn page.

Prior to that, Karkhanis worked at Salesforce in various management positions for just under 10 years, from July 2010 to May 2020, rising to the position of senior vice president of product management.

Karkhanis’ previous years at Salesforce included four years as general manager and senior vice president of product development for the company’s Einstein Analytics product; this experience was likely a factor in his hiring for the ThoughtSpot CEO position.

“Since its inception, ThoughtSpot has developed a fundamentally different approach to analytics, focused squarely on democratizing data and empowering everyone to make data-driven decisions with its AI and search-driven analytics platform,” Karkhanis said in the statement. I have already started working as CEO.

“ThoughtSpot has a significant advantage in the innovation required to truly meet the expectations created by genAI and has a proven solution that delivers value to some of the largest and most complex businesses in the world,” said Karkhanis. “I am extremely honored to have the opportunity to lead the company, which finds itself at the perfect time to intersect with the tailwinds of genAI and is in a strong position to capitalize on this market opportunity by delivering unparalleled value to more than a thousand customers worldwide. “

“In this period of accelerated transformation driven by the emergence of generative artificial intelligence, there is no better person than Ketan to lead ThoughtSpot,” Singh said in his statement. “He is a customer-focused, employee-focused business leader with deep experience in analytics and has built and led world-class SaaS businesses of significant scale.”