Srikant Sastri to partner Crayon Data as co-founder

The Big data space is hotting up fast in India and around the globe. With an ambitious global vision and a disruptive strategy, Singapore headquartered Crayon Data, with a development centre in India, has made rapid progress since its inception in 2012. Crayon now gets serial entrepreneur & digital evangelist, Srikant Sastri, as co-founder.

Crayon was founded by analytics pioneer, Suresh V Shankar, whose earlier analytics firm Red Pill Solutions was acquired by IBM, and angel funded by a group of prominent individual investors, including Srikant Sastri. Crayon‘s vision is to build a platform-based Big Data company, that challenges the conventional people-led model of analytics, and
delivers real business solutions by bringing together enterprise, public, external internet, and social data, to one cloud-based platform. Crayon’s platform is designed to “simplify choices” and their ambition is to democratize the world of Big Data.

Says Srikant, “ I am excited about the way Crayon brings together the world of enterprise analytics and digital and social media onto one Big Data platform. As organizations cope with rapidly growing silos of data within and outside their business, Crayon provides some real answers. Working with Suresh and rest of the Crayon team is something that I
really look forward to”.

The lineage of the two co-founders truly differentiates Crayon from other start-ups in this space. While Suresh is an entrepreneur from the world of enterprise analyticswith a deep product and domain understanding in banking and telecom, Srikant brings unparalleled expertise in digital marketing, institution-building, financial management, and M&A. Srikant and Suresh have known each other for 30 years, have collaborated on their earlier start-ups and bring together complementary skills. Given the ambitious vision that Crayon
has, this partnership is both distinctive and strategic.

Commenting on this, says Suresh Shankar, “ over the past 9 months, Crayon has brought together a great team of investors, advisors and experts across platform, delivery, data science, and UI/UX, at Singapore and Chennai. We are already seeing the impact in the form of real projects and revenues from global clients. Srikant is one of the
smartest people I have met in my life and having him formally become a co-founder is truly exciting”

As an entrepreneur and bridge-builder, Srikant has been deeply involved in building several businesses. Some of Srikant’s entrepreneurial high points have been the formation of SolutionsDigitas, which grew to become India and Southeast Asia’s leading marketing services agency followed by the conceiving of Team4U, India’s largest sales force staffing company, in 2005. These ventures got acquired by the Publicis Groupe, and Randstad respectively. In his most recent role as VivaKi India, Chairperson, Srikant led an ambitious
M&A strategy to help Publicis Groupe establish digital leadership in India, through the acquisition of Resultrix, Convonix and Neev Technologies.

Srikant started his career at Unilever and McCann – Erickson and has driven a big initiative focused towards development issues in Indian society through an initiative called “Growth-for-all’, a movement that brought together individuals, corporations, and non-government organizations in a collaborative setting. He is an active member of the Indian Angel Network, and TiE.