ThoughtSpot, the AI-powered analytics company, today announced that the Company has appointed Ketan Karkhanis as Chief Executive Officer.
Ketan is joining ThoughtSpot from Salesforce, where he has spent over a decade of his career. He most recently served as the Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Salesforce Sales Cloud business, leading one of the company’s largest cloud businesses that generated more than $7 billion last fiscal year.
He returned to Salesforce in March 2022 after his time as the COO of Turvo, a supply-chain collaboration platform that was acquired by Lineage Logistics in 2022. Before that, Ketan was the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Salesforce Einstein Analytics, incubating the business from launch to over $300 million and a 30,000-strong user community.
Ketan has a Bachelor’s in Computer Science from PICT (Pune Institute of Computer Technology, India) and an MBA from Santa Clara University Leavey School of Business.
“During this time of accelerated transformation driven by the advent of generative AI, there is no better person to lead ThoughtSpot than Ketan. He is a customer-obsessed, employee-focused business leader with a deep experience in analytics and has built and led world-class SaaS businesses of significant scale. The ThoughtSpot Board believes that Ketan is the right leader to help ThoughtSpot capitalize on its foundational innovation and capture the massive market opportunity that lies ahead in AI-powered analytics,” said Ajeet Singh, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of ThoughtSpot.
Singh added, “Over the last six months, ThoughtSpot has made significant progress in accelerating its product roadmap, delivering genAI-driven value to customers that are migrating away from legacy visualization platforms, and centering its focus on durable growth at scale, all setting the table for our next CEO.”
“Ketan has the passion and experience to lead ThoughtSpot in its next chapter. This appointment comes at a perfect time for the market as analytics is redefined by genAI, and ensures that ThoughtSpot is best positioned to scale rapidly,” said Ravi Mhatre, Founder and Managing Director of Lightspeed Venture Partners and the founding investor on ThoughtSpot’s Board of Directors.
“ThoughtSpot has built a fundamentally different approach to analytics since its inception, squarely focused on democratizing data and empowering everyone to make data-driven decisions with its AI and search-driven analytics platform,” said Ketan Karkhanis, CEO of ThoughtSpot.
“ThoughtSpot has a significant head start in innovation that is required for truly delivering on the expectations that genAI has created, with a proven solution that is delivering value to some of the largest and most complex enterprises in the world. I am extremely honored to have the opportunity to lead the company that finds itself intersecting with the genAI tailwinds at a perfect time, and is in a strong position to capitalize on this market opportunity by bringing unparalleled value to over a thousand customers across the globe,” he added.
