DriveWealth LLC named Gayathri Rajan as chief product officer and Harshal Deo as chief technology officer, the Jersey City financial technology company announced April 18.
Rajan and Deo will lead DriveWealth’s product and engineering teams and “will be instrumental in helping the company further its mission to democratize investing globally and empower anyone in the world with a phone to control their financial future from the palm of their hand,” the company stated.
“Expanding access to investing is about so much more than money – it’s really about empowering people to have more control over their lives. With such a bold goal, we need bold leadership,” Bob Cortright, founder and CEO of DriveWealth, said in a statement. “That’s why I’m thrilled Gayathri and Harshal have joined the DriveWealth team. I’m confident in the experience and vision they both bring to their new roles, and I know they’ll be the type of leaders we need at this inflection point for our company.”
Gayathri spent 16 years with Google, building platforms and products in collaboration with global partners. She founded Google’s payments platform, which manages the entirety of Google’s payments and disbursements, and more recently built out the high-growth enterprise business for Google Maps.
“I was drawn to DriveWealth for a number of reasons, but mostly because I believe in its mission to democratize investing,” Rajan said in a statement, calling the company’s application programming interface-first approach a “game changer.”
“There is a tremendous opportunity to allow consumers around the world to participate in markets that were previously inaccessible, and to help them become owners of their financial futures,” Rajan added.
Harshal joins DriveWealth after a combined 16 years working at eBay and PayPal, where he pioneered the use of AI for fraud detection. At PayPal, he ran a global engineering and product organization that enabled the company’s entry into shopping and delivered PayPal Commerce Platform for Businesses, enabling seamless commerce for more than 20 million businesses worldwide, DriveWealth stated.
“I am passionate about leveraging technology to solve large-scale global problems, hence DriveWealth’s mission to democratize investing really appeals to me,” Deo said. “I am impressed by the engineering team that Bob has already built at DriveWealth to deliver an industry-leading, ultra low latency trading platform. I am looking forward to augmenting that with top talent from Silicon Valley and leveraging recent advances in technologies like blockchain and AI to further accelerate innovation for DriveWealth’s partners.”
