Ambiga Dhiraj has taken over as CEO of Mu Sigma, at a time when women are a rarity at the top in... [+]
Ambiga Dhiraj, a former Motorola engineer, has taken over as the CEO of Mu Sigma, a data analytics firm that is valued at over a $1 billion. A woman leading a unicorn, a term used to describe startups valued over a billion dollars, is still a rarity.
Dhiraj took over the reins last week from her husband, the firm’s founder, Dhiraj Rajaram, who is now chairman and has moved to Chicago to drive the firm’s customer relationships.
“Mu Sigma is chasing $1 billion in revenues, I am going after that dream target in the next few years,” said Dhiraj who will be based in Bangalore. That would mean a quadrupling of Mu Sigma’s current $250 million revenues.
Mu Sigma, which helps global firms like Wal-Mart, Microsoft, Pfizer and 140 others to glean patterns out of vast tracts of data amassed from dozens of sources and put it to use in refining product design, marketing, supply chain and risk assessments across sectors. The firm is headquartered in Chicago and has over 3,500 employees, nearly all of them in Bangalore.
Dhiraj has handled various roles in the company including starting up the firm’s marketing team, heading human resources and leading its India delivery center. She became its chief operating officer a year ago. Mu Sigma’s investors include Sequoia Capital, General Atlantic and Fidelity Investments. Rajaram and Dhiraj own 47% of the company. Since its last funding round in 2013, media reports have cited Mu Sigma as being in talks to raise fresh capital but there has been no announcement since then.
Dhiraj’s ascent, albeit in a company founded by her husband, is significant even as diversity has become a much-debated issue in technology centers like the Silicon Valley. In India, where women engineers make up half the class in many engineering schools and comprise a sizable fraction of the country's technology workforce, women CEOs are still scarce.
Dhiraj who describes herself as shy and geeky said she loves the idea of engineering everything – from products to organizations. “I love technological changes which give impetus to innovation,” she said in a conversation.
When she drives the operations in her new role, husband Rajaram will help global firms with their big data strategy and drive its expansion into newer, non-English speaking geographies in Europe and Asia.
Dhiraj said she would structure the internals of Mu Sigma for the growth wave expected to hit the company in the coming years. The data analytics firm already executes a wide range of projects. For a pharma manufacturer which is piloting the use of sensors in patients, it helps harness the data from the human body to refine how drugs are to be delivered. “Earlier, data was one-dimensional and solely available from transactions – such as people buying cars at dealerships. But now data is flying in from everywhere,” said Dhiraj.
A video analytics solution built by Mu Sigma analyses streaming video from retail stores of customers and is able to give a context to what is going on in the store, which product needs attention or where to deploy staff.
Data from sensors inside shoes is helping global brands build better and more personalized shoes. “Earlier product design ideas came from focus groups and ethnographic studies but now real-time data is coming companies’ way,” she said.
Both Dhiraj and Rajaram came from humble middle-class families in southern India and left for the United States to attend engineering school. They led the typical Indian immigrant life, saving every dollar and never taking a vacation. Their only extravagance was returning to India every few years to visit the parents.
In the beginning Dhiraj, a former Booz Allen Hamilton executive, sold the couple’s home in Illinois and pooled in eight years of their savings, $250,000 to launch Mu Sigma. “I call it the illegitimate child of Google, a company I admire, and consulting firm McKinsey,” Rajaram said in an interview last year. “We want to take the best of everything and build something original by ourselves.”
