India’s leading fintech platform, ‘BharatPe’, has appointed Ritesh Srivastava as their new Chief Data Scientist. Prior to his current role, Ritesh served as the Associate Director of Data Science, Digital and Advanced Analytics at Novartis. At Novartis, he led state-of-the-art research and development projects on resource allocation, NLP, chatbots, computer vision, speech recognition, and related AI/ML areas.

Ritesh has more than 13 years of experience in senior data and technology leadership positions across MNCs, including Novartis (New York, UK, Switzerland) and Lowe’s Home Improvements, USA. Over the years, he has built and led data science and engineering teams across domains such as travel, pharma, BFSI, retail, automobile & FMCG.

He was among the Top 40 under 40 Data Scientists in India and the Top 100 Analytics leaders in the APAC region in recognition of his scientific and industry contributions to the field of aata science and artificial intelligence. 

An alumnus of IIMB and Praxis, Ritesh is an external industry member of the Board of Studies for Data Science, AI and Cloud Technology courses offered at the ITM  Vocational University, Vadodara. 

“As the Chief Data Scientist, I will lead the utilisation and governance of data at BharatPe, including data science, data engineering, data management and strategy. My primary focus would be to bring in a data-driven culture and decision-making in this fast-growing organisation. BharatPe is already a fintech Unicorn, and I believe that the time is right for us to harness the true potential of big data and make it an AI/ML-enabled Juggernaut.”—Ritesh Srivastava