Japanese etailer Rakuten opens group’s largest overseas office in Bengaluru

Rakuten India announced Thursday the formal launch of their new office Rakuten – Crimson House Bengaluru in the city- the company’s largest outside of Japan. The Bengaluru facility will service the company’s existing businesses like Rakuten Pay in Japan, India offerings, media and streaming solutions for Europe and APAC as well as new credit and banking solutions to be launched in the US next year, Sunil Gopinathan, Rakuten India chief executive officer (CEO) told ET.

Located at Cubbon Park, Rakuten – Crimson House Bengaluru is a 20-storeyed building. With a capacity for housing over 3,000 employees, it currently accommodates 2,000 employees with room to grow. The product, engineering, and advanced research facility represents a further expansion of the company’s global technology footprint and will focus on developing and delivering a wide range of cross-industry deep technology solutions to help drive digital transformation and innovation for global customers and partners.

“As we expand more services to different countries we need a center for globalizing our businesses. And Rakuten India happens to be the strategic center of choice for Rakuten, Inc, to help our globalization initiative, whether it’s Europe, other regions in Asia or North America”, said Sunil Gopinath, CEO of Rakuten India.

The new office will focus on R&D in areas such as e-commerce, fintech, content and entertainment, as well as AI in computer vision, speech, and natural language processing (NLP). “We are building an Enterprise Technology Business for the India market. We launched a product called SixthSense for large-scale application performance monitoring. We are now going to go global from here and launch this product in the US, Europe. India has been a great testing ground for us from that perspective,” he added.

Rakuten ‘SixthSense’, the company’s first B2B SaaS product, an all-in-one observability intelligence and software testing automation platform, hit the market last year.

The company is also working extensively with fintech companies in India with its experience in financial and payment solutions. A third of Rakuten Inc’s revenue is generated from fintech solutions globally. The company will however focus on offering its B2B2C solutions in India before it ventures into its B2C solutions. It currently has a messaging platform- Viber operating in India.

“And we will be announcing some partnerships in the next few weeks where we are going to be working with travel companies in India for booking solutions- both airlines as well as hotels- we are looking at opportunities to use Viber to enable them to book travel,” he added.

The company is also growing its employee base aggressively having grown 70% over the past 18 months.

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