ThoughtSpot Taps Former Salesforce Exec As Its New CEO

Ketan Karkhanis, whose dozen-plus years at Salesforce include managing product development of the company’s Einstein Analytics, fills the post that’s been vacant since former CEO Sudheesh Nair left in March.

ThoughtSpot has named former Salesforce executive Ketan Karkhanis (pictured) as the data analytics company’s new CEO, filling the top executive post that has been open since Sudheesh Nair stepped down in March.

ThoughtSpot, which recently said it recorded 40 percent growth in its software-as-a-service offerings in its fiscal 2024, said it will look to Karkhanis to maintain the company’s momentum in the competitive data analytics and business intelligence space.

“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, ThoughtSpot co-founder and executive chairman, in a statement announcing Karkhanis’ appointment.

On Feb. 26, ThoughtSpot announced that Nair, who had been the company’s CEO since August 2018, had “elected to step down” as CEO. Nair left the company in March, according to his LinkedIn page. No specific reason for his departure was given either in the Feb. 26 announcement or in a March 15 blog post by Singh titled “ThoughtSpot’s Next Chapter.”

During the search for a new CEO the company was managed by an office of the CEO led by Singh and including Chief Development Officer Sumeet Arora, Chief Financial Officer Mohit Daswani and Chief Revenue Officer Jeff Depa.

ThoughtSpot has become one of the leading companies in the crowded data analytics and business intelligence space with its on-premises, cloud and embedded analytics products. In recent years the company has been expanding the AI capabilities of its software and launched its ThoughtSpot Sage AI-based search tool.

ThoughtSpot has been listed on the CRN Big Data 100 and the CRN AI 100. This year the company was listed as a leader in the Gartner Data Analytics and Business Intelligence Magic Quadrant report.

“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,” Singh said in the statement announcing Karkhanis’ appointment.

Karkhanis has spent more than 12 years at Salesforce, working through two terms at the cloud application giant. Since April 2022 he has been executive vice president and general manager of the Salesforce Sales Cloud business, which generated $7 billion in the company’s last fiscal year.

Between May 2020 and April 2022 he was chief operating officer of Turvo, a developer of supply chain management and collaboration software, that was acquired by Lineage Logistics in June 2022. His duties there included leading the company’s product, engineering and customer success teams, according to his LinkedIn page.

Before that Karkhanis worked at Salesforce in various management posts for just short of 10 years, between July 2010 and May 2020, reaching the position of senior vice president of product management.

Karkhanis’ earlier time at Salesforce included four years as general manager and senior vice president of product development of the company’s Einstein Analytics product – experience that was likely a factor in his hiring for the ThoughtSpot CEO post.

“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,” Karkhanis said in the statement, which indicated that he has already started working in the CEO job.

“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,” Karkhanis said. “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,”

“During this time of accelerated transformation driven by the advent of generative AI, there is no better person to lead ThoughtSpot than Ketan,” Singh said in the statement. “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.”