Santanu Bhattacharya is a data scientist, innovator, and thought leader with a career spanning academia, industry, and entrepreneurship. He has held executive leadership roles at major companies, including Airtel, NatWest Bank (UK), and Facebook, where he built global technology and innovation teams to create cutting-edge technologies and AI, generating over $10B in business values in the past two decades.

Santanu is currently a Scientist at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on an exciting journey to the world of Generative AI, Dimensional AI and Digital Public Infrastructure for the Emerging world. ​Before MIT, he was the Chief Technologist at NatWest, UK’s “big four’ bank, driving strategy, digital transformation and technology for Bank’s “Digital Bank for the 21st Century” strategy, overseeing 2,000 engineers and £400M ($0.5) technology budget.

Prior, at Airtel, world’s second largest Telco, as the Chief Data Scientist, he was responsible for building the core data and AI foundations for the “Airtel 3.0” transformation, resulting in significant growth in EBITDA. He was part of Facebook’s (Meta) fabled Growth team, turbocharging the Emerging Market Products with 300 million users in 79 countries. Santanu has also led Data and AI at Delhivery, India’s largest third party eCommerce startup, setting up the foundation for 6X growth, leading to its $4B IPO in 2021. He was the founding Director of America Online’s (AOL) Analytics Centre managing global data and $1B ad platforms and founded two successful startups, resulting in exits to PE investors and Facebook.

Santanu is a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre, part of the CASSINI mission to Saturn, an alumnus of MIT and IIT-Bombay and a former Visiting Professor at Indian Institute of Science. He was speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and has been covered in Forbes, Mashable, TechCrunch, Le Monde, The Economic Times etc.