Chakri Gottemukkala

Chakri Gottemukkala is o9 co-founder & CEO. He is the driving force behind the exponential growth of o9 globally - with its cloud software platform now being used by global companies across a variety of Retail, Consumer Products and Manufacturing verticals to drive Digital Transformation of their end to end Analytics & Planning capabilities. Chakri is a technology visionary and entrepreneur, with a passion for architecting cutting edge software to solve complex and high value business problems . Armed with deep insights into practical challenges that global enterprises are facing in detecting market risks and opportunities earlier and responding with fast, smart, integrated decisions across commercial and supply chain siloes, Chakri brought together a world class team to design, develop and launch the o9 platform. Since launch in 2014, the differentiation of the o9 platform has been validated by the market adoption by global companies like Walmart, Nike, Starbucks, Estee Lauder, GE, Google, Caterpillar, and Exxon Mobil. It has also been recognized by Gartner as a leader and as the “Most Visionary” in it’s S&OP magic quadrant. Chakri is focused on developing the o9 organization with a management philosophy that inspires world class talent to express themselves as leaders and entrepreneurs, instead of being stifled by traditional hierarchies. Under his leadership, o9 has grown from two people at founding to a global organization of five hundred people and growing, with operations in North America, EMEA, India, and APAC. With Chakri’s focus on 10x process innovation and fiscal responsibility, o9 grew from startup to profitability without any external investments, a rarity in the cloud software industry. o9’s rapid growth, blue chip client list, technology platform differentiation against established players have all resulted in KKR, a leading global investment firm making a minority investment in o9 in 2020, with a valuation of north of 1 Billion US $. Chakri’s focus is now growing the company to be a category defining platform across all major industry verticals, helping create great value for global companies, and significant financial success for shareholders and employees. - Chakri holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, and a Master’s degree from the University of California, Los Angeles(UCLA).