GO-JEK, Indonesia’s first unicorn and the fastest growing start-up in Southeast Asia, today announced the appointment of Niranjan Paranjape as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of GO-JEK. Niranjan will lead the team that powers GO-JEK’s 1 million registered driver fleet.
In the last 36 months, the startup has grown exponentially and diversified into 18 verticals. GO-FOOD alone does more orders in Indonesia than all Indian food tech startups combined.
Niranjan will be shuttling between Bangalore and Jakarta overseeing GO-JEK’s core services specifically in transport, logistics, food and hyper-local courier delivery. As part of his role, Niranjan will also be driving expansion plans to other markets. Ajey Gore will continue as the Group CTO of GO-JEK.
“We’re growing at an exponential rate and our 200-person engineering team currently runs 18+ products. We’re tripling our order volumes every year and adding to our talent is key to accelerate our presence in Southeast Asia. One of my key objectives is to shape the lean engineering mindset we’ve cultivated over the years. For example, we have a 12 engineers handling 1 million registered drivers, which is testimonial to degree of efficiency in our technology. Automation is at the centre of what we do and maintaining this culture while we scale is important for a company as large as GO-JEK. We’re many companies rolled into one and getting passionate engineers on board to solve these unique problems is going to be an interesting challenge to undertake,” said Niranjan Paranjape, CTO, GO-JEK.
Niranjan will also be looking to sustain hypergrowth across GO-JEK’s 18+ products. He will also be responsible for efforts to add to products and services across markets by building tools, frameworks and practices to speed up the pace of product development that matches GO-JEK’s scale.
Niranjan has more than 13 years of experience as a programmer, consultant and entrepreneur. He started his career at Infosys, before moving to ThoughtWorks where he consulted for Fortune 500 clients. He then went on to co-found C42 Engineering, a boutique software engineering consulting firm. As CTO of C42 Engineering, Niranjan was responsible for building a high performance engineering culture focused on passion for new technologies, code quality and daily customer engagement. C42 engineering was acquired by GO-JEK in early 2016. Niranjan has worked with a wide range of clients architecting and coding solutions across the entire stack from front-end to infrastructure.
Niranjan is also a trustee of ‘The Emerging Technology Trust’, a non-profit focusing on creating opportunities and events to promote new, open source, programming languages, tools and methodologies in India. Niranjan plays an important role to engage with the developer community and share best practices with the engineering talent in India.
Founded in 2011 by Harvard graduate Nadiem Makarim, GO-JEK started as a bike-taxi hailing business. Since then, the start-up has grown exponentially and diversified into leading on-demand services platforms offering food delivery, instant courier delivery, grocery delivery, etc.
With more than 70 million app downloads per January 2018, GO-JEK’s platform powers the Indonesian equivalents of Indian taxi aggregators, food delivery start-ups, hyperlocal start-ups, digital wallet start-ups and home service based start-ups, all in one, at a comparable and sometimes larger scale.
