BENGALURU: Rakuten India, the global product and innovation centre for Japanese giant Rakuten Group in August announced the opening of its largest product, engineering and advanced research and development facility in Bengaluru, largest outside Japan. With a capacity for housing more than 3,000 employees, the 20-storeyed premise with around 3 lakh square feet of space currently accommodates 2,000 workers.

Sunil Gopinath, CEO of Rakuten India, told IANS that the new facility will enhance the company’s capability for deep-tech innovation and R&D in areas such as e-commerce, fintech, content and entertainment, as well as AI in computer vision, speech, and natural language processing (NLP). “Rakuten is a very aspirational brand for young, talented engineers, scientists and researchers in India. From fintech to healthcare and supply chain/logistics, we are constantly scouting and encouraging new talent to come and innovate with us to build global solutions from here,” Gopinath told IANS. Admitting that there is a talent crunch for new-age technologies, he said that India needs to expand the base of its talent pool. Rakuten ‘SixthSense’, the company’s first B2B software-as-a-service (SaaS) product, an all-in-one observability intelligence and software testing automation platform, entered the Indian market last year.

“India is and has been central to our growth strategy. Our new R&D centre will build on the high value-added engagements that Rakuten has been delivering from India on deep tech and product innovation,” said Yasufumi Hirai, Executive Vice President of Rakuten Group. Rakuten India enables global businesses in the areas of e-commerce, fintech, advertising, mobile, content and entertainment with deep expertise in the areas of data science and engineering, machine learning, artificial intelligence, cloud, security, distributed systems and more.