Gupshup (also known as SMS Gupshup, Webaroo) is a messaging services company with primary operations in India,
Beerud is a co-founder of Webaroo. Prior to Webaroo, Beerud founded Elance, the pioneer of the world’s largest online services marketplace. He played various leadership roles at different stages of the company’s growth, including developing product and business strategies, product management, marketing & business development, and remains on the board of directors. Prior to founding Elance, Beerud worked in the financial services industry; modeling, structuring, and trading fixed income securities and derivatives at Merrill Lynch and before that at Citicorp Securities. His graduate research, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, involved developing autonomous learning software agents for personalized news filtering.
Beerud earned an M.S. in computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology & a B.Tech in Computer Science IIT Bombay, where he was awarded the Institute Silver Medal.
Rakesh is a co-founder of Webaroo. He has been a founder of three technology start up companies in the past 10 years and also an early stage investor in several other companies. He was a founder and CEO of Junglee, whose virtual database technology led to the creation of comparison shopping on the Internet. Junglee was acquired by Amazon.com in 1998. He founded Armedia, which was one of the first companies with chip designs for the video component of the DVD standard. Armedia was acquired by Broadcom in 1999. He also founded PurpleYogi, now Stratify which provides enterprise solutions to the management of unstructured data. Rakesh is a board member of Geodesic, a BSE listed company whose Mundu Instant Messenger is used by millions of people.
Rakesh was recognized as a member of the 1998 Upside 100, the 2001 India Today Global 100 and Junglee technology was given the Computerworld – Smithsonian award as one of the top five technologies of 1998. Rakesh received his MS from the University of Texas at Arlington and his B.Tech from IIT Bombay.
