Walmart Inc., No. 3 in the Internet Retailer 2019 Top 1000, hired Suresh Kumar as chief technology officer and chief development officer, effective July 8.
Kumar has held senior roles at Amazon.com Inc. (No. 1), Microsoft Corp. and most recently at Google Inc., where he held the position of vice president and general manager of Google Display + Video ads, apps and analytics for more than a year. Before that, he spent nearly four years at Microsoft as corporate vice present of Microsoft cloud infrastructure and operations, as well as 15 years with Amazon in various roles such as vice present of worldwide retail systems, director of software development and senior manager of procurement systems.
“Suresh has a unique understanding of the intersection of technology and retail, including supply chain, and has deep experience in advertising, cloud and machine learning. And, he has a track record of working in partnership with business teams to drive results,” Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said.
Jeremy King, who was head of technology for Walmart U.S., left the retailer in March and is now head of engineering at Pinterest.
In other ecommerce news:
- Bark, the company behind dog treat and toy subscription boxes BarkBox and No. 212 in the Top 1000, has launched its subscriptions boxes on Amazon’s subscription box store. Amazon shoppers can subscribe to the monthly subscription for $29 per box with free shipping. “Last year we began selling Bark products on Amazon… Adding easy access to BarkBox subscriptions will now help us to easily reach millions of Amazon customers with our most popular product,” said Matt Meeker, co-founder and CEO of Bark. Amazon launched its subscription box service in 2017 and offers a variety of beauty, food and toy subscription boxes for Amazon shoppers.
- Software-as-a-service customer service platform Kustomer raised $40 million in a Series D funding round, led by Tiger Global Management. This brings the company’s total funding to $113.5 million, according to Crunchbase. Kustomer allows retailers—such as its customers Glossier Inc. (No. 404), Untuckit (No. 338) and Rent the Runway Inc. (No. 262)—to have insights into customer history and data to create a better online shopping experience. Kustomer will use the funding to continue to grow abroad by increasing its European presence and plans to double its overall staff size worldwide by the end of this year.
- Payments company Splitit Payments has raised $30 million AUD ($20.7 million), bringing its total to $43.1 million, according to Crunchbase. The payment company also hopes to raise an additional $10 million AUD ($6.9 million). The funding will help Splitit expand its team and continue to grow at a fast pace since its IPO in January. “Splitit continues to grow at a rapid pace; we now serve hundreds of merchants in 27 countries,” said Gil Don, Splitit CEO and co-founder. “We look forward to continuing this strong trajectory, expanding our sales team as well as our product and R&D teams to bring interest- and fee-free installment payments to [more] merchants and shoppers across the globe.”