When 2021 was receding into the past, the Indian community gave three CEOs to America: Parag Agarwal, Anand Eswaran and Kedar Deshpande. In 2022, Maju Kuruvilla, 44, is the first Indian American to have become a CEO and entered the elite group of Indian-origin tech CEOs in USA. Amazon’s former vice president Maju Kuruvilla has been named CEO of Bolt, a California-based fintech startup that currently stands at a valuation of USD 8.5 billion and eyes a $14-billion valuation in the near future.
Maju Kuruvilla is now part of the growing tech force behind the startup revolution in the United States where 25% of nearly 20,000 startups are run by Indian-origin founders, co-founders, CEOs, and CTOs. Evidently, Joe Biden acknowledged that “Indian Americans have powered the economic growth of the United States and helped forged cultural dynamism in the country” during his electoral campaigns in 2020.
Bolt’s Indian-origin CEO Maju Kuruvilla who hails from Karnataka does currently live in San Francisco. He replaced Bolt’s founder cum CEO Ryan Breslow who took up a new role as executive chairman on the board. Founded 6 years ago, Bolt, which makes payment software solutions for ecommerce websites, appointed Kuruvilla as the chief product and technology officer in January 2021. He was given the role of chief operating officer (COO) in August 2021. In just 5 months thereafter, he got promoted as CEO of Bolt.
Announcing his decision to join Bolt’s leadership team, Maju Kuruvilla had written on LinkedIn,
“I’ve always been attracted to complex problems, and how to use technology to simplify and improve the world around me. In my career, I’ve been lucky to have had the opportunity to work on ground-breaking challenges across various domains, like automating financial transitions between hospitals and insurance companies, scaling Prime fulfilment at Amazon, and rethinking Amazon’s global logistics during a global pandemic. And, now, turning my attention to the challenge of simplifying (and revolutionizing) how we buy and sell online.
Selling and buying things online is not easy, unless it is an ecommerce giant like Amazon. While every retailer aims to make shopping easy and simple, they’re faced with technical challenges. Few companies can afford to build the entire stack and keep up with consumer expectations. One of the most important, yet challenging, problems to solve is checkout and post-purchase experience. This is where Bolt comes in. Bolt provides a simple one-click checkout experience for shoppers, while providing retailers the freedom to focus on what matters most – their product, brand, and customer base. Bolt simplifies the complex integration needs across verticals….”
After having earned an MBA degree from the University of Michigan, he began his pursuit of American Dreams as a software engineer with Honeywell in 1999. He moved to Microsoft in February 2001. After a stint of two years at Microsoft, he joined Milliman as Vice President of Products in Seattle, where he simplified financial transactions between hospitals and insurance companies. The day he joined Amazon as Director of Software Development in March 2013 was a watershed moment in his career. He resigned as Vice President of Amazon after an illustrious tenure of 7 years 10 months. He managed Amazon’s global logistics and the Amazon Prime fulfilment technology team. At Amazon, he used to be referred to as “one of the company’s fastest growing engineering stars”.