Karthik
Jayaraman

Karthik Jayaraman

(MSIE 1998)
Outstanding Industrial Engineer (2023)
Karthik Jayaraman comes with a diverse experience spanning nearly 25 years in the fields of engineering, automotive and management consulting. In the past, he has been associated with leading firms like Ashok Leyland, McKinsey and Company, Tata Motors, Timken. In his tenure in these companies, Karthik has been part of transformational programs, such as building India's first indigenous passenger car platform at Tata Motors, one of India's first global R and D centres at Timken, leading large operations and organizational transformations across a wide base of heavy engineering and manufacturing firms at McKinsey, and being a key driver in Ashok Leyland's highly successful business transformation story. Karthik started his entrepreneurial journey with WayCool in 2015 with his partner and Co-Founder Sanjay Dasari. WayCool has been working to address the problem of food loss in India. India, a country of 1.4 billion population, has resources to produce food surplus, but loses nearly 20% of its food between the farmgate and the retail point. Within just seven years since its inception, WayCool has flipped the entire food value chain on its head, transforming it from a supply-led one to a demand-led one. This was done by mimicking the principles of the Toyota Production System and applying it, using technology, to the long, fragmented and unorganized food supply chain in India. WayCool, under Karthik???s leadership, has built over 59 apps that seamlessly capture retailer demand from over 65000 retailers every month, broadcast the same to over 200,000 farmers, and tracking the flow of produce, staples and milk back from the farmers to the retailers, real time, through WayCool???s network of collection centers, factories and distribution centers.