By Ayushman Baruah
Rakuten India, the product and innovation centre of Japanese internet conglomerate Rakuten Group, Inc., is expanding in India with plans to hire at least 1,000 people in the next few months. Rakuten India has formally opened a new office in Bengaluru as part of expanding the company’s global technology footprint. The Bengaluru centre serves as a tech hub to support the company’s global operations. “It will focus on developing and delivering a wide range of cross-industry deep technology solutions to help drive digital transformation and innovation for customers and partners,” the company said in a statement. With a capacity for housing over 3,000 employees, the new office currently accommodates about 2,000 employees.
The expansion is expected to further enhance the company’s capability for deep-tech innovation and research and development (R&D) in areas such as e-commerce, fintech, content and entertainment, as well as artificial intelligence (AI) in computer vision, speech, and natural language processing (NLP). Rakuten ‘SixthSense’, the company’s first B2B SaaS product hit the Indian market last year. “In India, one part of the work we do is around business enablement…but we also do deep technology, data science, and research work out of India, for example, face recognition for e-KYC, computer vision, voice-based commerce…we are also working on cancer cure for Rakuten Medical,” said Sunil Gopinath, CEO of Rakuten India.
“India is and has been central to our growth strategy. Our new R&D centre will build on the high value-added engagements that Rakuten has been delivering from India on deep tech and product innovation. Our modern and environment friendly facility provides a perfect environment to return to office post pandemic and is designed to foster collaboration and innovation,” said Yasufumi Hirai, group executive vice president of Rakuten Group.
