Our people

Executive Management

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Capt. Rajesh
Unni

Capt. Unni is the Co-CEO and a board member of the Alpha Ori Group. In a career spanning over 25 years in shipping, he has served in various roles across countries. He is driven by a vision to transform the maritime industry through technology and innovation. He is a Class 1 Master Mariner from the LBS College of Advanced Maritime Studies & Research, Mumbai.

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Bala
Sankaran

Bala Sankaran is a business, operations, and tech executive. Previously, he was Vice President - Global Sales, Marketing Operations & Learning at Twitter. Bala also spent 6 years in management roles at Google, NYC. His strategic expertise was acquired at McKinsey & Company and he holds a Marine Engineering degree from MERI, Calcutta and a Master of Business Administration from Wharton School.

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Sam
Jha

Sam is a business and technology executive in the B2B enterprise and mobile software industry specializing in devices, platform, applications and services. He has managed P&L of various cutting edge technology businesses including Cloud and Edge SW, AGPS, IoT, OS platform, Computational camera, Computer Vision and Machine Learning.

Prior to joining AOT as Cofounder and Chief Product Officer, Sam led Qualcommʼs business unit for Advanced Software Technologies on Snapdragon chipsets. His career also includes various product management and business development roles at Sprint Inc. and Nextel Communications Inc. in mobile handset and machine to machine (M2M) divisions. Sam started his career as an engineer in mercantile marine and served to become Assistant Chief Engineer on oil tankers. Sam has completed the executive business administration program (PLD) from Harvard Business School. He holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from DMET in India and, an MBA from The College of William and Mary (Raymond A Mason School of Business) in the USA.

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Biju
Nair

Biju is a technology professional with more than 25 years of experience. He has been spearheading advanced product engineering development for ThinkPalm Technologies and his interests span across development, quality assurance and engineering operation functions.

His extensive international experience has enabled him to manage globally distributed organizations as part of the senior management teams at Fortune companies, including major telecom product companies like Cisco & Brocade. He has also led business units as VP/General Manager of businesses at Ruckus Wireless taking new products to market with P&L ownership. He is based out of California and spearheading the Alpha Ori Group activities across the technology and products spectrum.

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Sanjeev
Namath

Sanjeev is a Business and Marine Technical executive with 28+ years in maritime ranging from serving as Chief Engineer on Merchant Marine fleet to heading the New Projects and R&D team for a leading Ship management company. Sanjeev has undergone Postgraduate program from IIT Kharagpur in Marine Operations & Management and comes with vast experience in Classification Society and in innovative projects such as construction of membrane LNG Carriers, Performance Analysis of vessels, studies on improving operational efficiency of vessels. In the recent past, he was involved in design & construction of 3 gas carriers in Korean yards which were equipped with cutting edge technology in energy efficiency and were the test beds for SMARTShip systems developed & installed by Alpha Ori.