Rana Gujral

Rana Gujral (born, 18 June, 1976 in Pune, India) is an Indian American entrepreneur, investor, speaker and business executive based in San Francisco, California Gujral is a highly acclaimed keynote speaker and currently serves as the chief executive officer of Behavioral Signals, an award winning emotion recognition and behavioral analytics AI technology company. Gujral has over 20 years of experience in the technology field and sits on the boards of several organizations including various startups including Token Inc and Lowell Association for the Blinds.
Gujral was recognised as one of the eight A.I. entrepreneurs to watch in 2019 by INC. magazine. He has been featured in several articles and media outlets such as Forbes, FOX, Startup Grind, The Huffington Post, Entrepreneur and INC for his work. He is regularly seen at AI technology conferences and industry, such as the World Government Summit and AI Everything in Dubai, the Silicon Valley Smart Future Summit, and IEIE in New York.
He is also a council member of Forbes and YEC. Gujral is also a contributing writer for TechCrunch, Forbes, “ReadWrite”, and other publications.
== Early life and education ==
Gujral was born in Pune, India on 18 June 1976. He graduated from the Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Rohilkhand University in 1997, where he pursued a bachelors degree in computer science and engineering. He then went to TACK University in the United Kingdom where he did a marketing course. Gujral also attended MIT Sloan School of Management for MTPO in 2000. In 2002, Gujral pursued a Masters course in business administration (finance) at the University of Massachusetts.
== Career ==
Gujral began his career in 1997 as a software engineer for Newgen, a Delhi, India based enterprise that works on content Management and business process management software. Gujral worked on systems design and development of a canon product - CanoBureau Workgroup. He stayed with Newgen for nearly two years.
In 1999, after leaving Newgen, Gujral joined Scudder Kemper Investments in Boston Massachusetts where he worked as an Engagement Lead consulting on several enterprise SaaS initiatives. He left this job in 2000 and joined Kronos Incorporated. His first position in the company was principal software engineer and led several projects for the company. In 2004, he was promoted to become a senior manager of engineering and product, where he headed the architecture, design and development of several best seller products of Kronos including Kronos-InTouch Terminal. He also developed 4500 Biometrics Terminal, which won several awards and generated well over $1 billion revenue for the company. During his time at the company, he led several key development projects and initiatives. Gujral worked for almost a decade in this company.
Gujral was appointed a board member of Lowell Association for the Blinds (LAB), a non-profit, community based organization in Lowell Massachusetts.
In 2010, Gujral became a director of engineering at Logitech in San Francisco and worked for over two years. 
In 2012, Gujral joined Cricut, a leading technology company in South Jordan, Utah as their executive VP and officer. He was responsible for the Technology, Product, Design/UX, IT and Strategy. Gujral led Cricut’s biggest product launch of Cricut Explore.
Gujral became a board member of various technology startups in 2013, where he invests in the pre growth stage of the companies, focusing in AI, Healthcare, SeniorTech, and niche vertical SaaS.
In 2014, Gujral founded TiZE Inc that provides PLM Cloud software for the specialty chemicals industry. Under Gujral’s leadership TiZE was listed as one of the 20 Most Promising PLM Software Technology Solution Providers in 2015 by CIO Review and in 2016, it was featured in Silicon Review where it made it to the list of 50 smartest companies in the year 2016. Gujral was also named as the Entrepreneur of the month during his time at TiZE. Later it was acquired by Alchemy.
In 2016, Gujral became a contributing writer for TechCrunch, where he writes on the topics of thought leadership and tech trends. Later in the year, Gujral was named as a mentor at Hack Temple, a startup embassy for entrepreneurial minds.
In 2017, Gujral was appointed as the vice president of Logitech. He was also named as a board member and investor at Hackient, a company specialising in AI, Machine Learning, Blockchain, and Big Data implementations in 2018. Gujral was appointed as a board advisor at Token Inc, a modern banking platform in 2018.
By the end of 2018, Gujral joined Behavioral Signals as its CEO and its board member.Behavioral Signals is best known for its proprietary deep learning, emotion recognition and behavioral prediction analytics.This company works on bridging the communication gap between humans and machines by introducing emotional intelligence, from speech into conversations with AI. Behavioral Signals’ technology captures acoustic cues, intonation, and other interaction signals to identify emotions and behaviours of an artificial system. Behavioral Signals is a 6-time Gold winner of the INTERSPEECH.
Behavioral Signals was a winner at the Gold-standard Emotion Sub-challenge at the 2018 ACM Audio-Visual Emotion Challenge.
== In the media ==
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== References ==
== External links == 
* Official Website
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Category:American businessmen of Indian descent
Category:Indian-American businesspeople
Category:American investors
Category:American motivational speakers
Category:Indian business executives