Vivek Kundra

Vivek Kundra (born October 9, 1974) is an American former administrator who served as the first chief information officer of the United States from March, 2009 to August, 2011 under President Barack Obama. He is currently Chief Operating Officer at the Trade Desk, a provider of advertising technology software based in New York City. He was the chief operating officer at Sprinklr, a provider of enterprise customer experience management software based in New York City. He was previously a visiting Fellow at Harvard University.

He previously served in D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty's cabinet as the District's chief technology officer and in Virginia governor Tim Kaine's cabinet as Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Technology.

Kundra was born in New Delhi, India, on October 9, 1974. He moved to Tanzania with his family at the age of one, when his father joined a group of professors and teachers to provide education to local residents. Kundra learned Swahili as his first language, in addition to Hindi and English. His family moved to the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area when he was eleven.

Kundra attended college at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he received a degree in psychology. He earned a master's degree in information technology, from the University of Maryland University College. Additionally, he is a graduate of the University of Virginia's Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership.

Kundra is currently the chief operating officer at Sprinklr, a provider of enterprise customer experience management software based in NYC.

Previously, Kundra served as director of Infrastructure Technology for Arlington County, Virginia, starting September 11, 2001.

Governor Tim Kaine appointed Kundra in January 2006 to the post of Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Technology for Virginia, the first dual cabinet role in the state's history.

Mayor Adrian Fenty appointed him on March 27, 2007, to the cabinet post of chief technology officer (CTO) for the District of Columbia. Kundra worked on developing programs to spur open source and crowdsourced applications using publicly accessible Web services from the District of Columbia. Building on the work of Suzanne Peck, who preceded him as DC's CTO and created the D.C. Data Catalog, he used that data as the source material for an initiative called Apps for Democracy Archived 2008-11-21 at the Wayback Machine. The contest yielded 47 web, iPhone and Facebook applications from residents in 30 days. Mayor Fenty stated that the program cost the District "50 thousand dollars total and we estimate that we will save the district millions of dollars in program development costs". This cost-benefit was claimed by the D.C. government as savings in internal operational and contractual costs. Taking a page from Kundra this initiative was mirrored by New York City's mayor Michael Bloomberg in launching a "BigApps" contest housed at NYC BigApps as well as New York City's DataMine. The city of San Francisco launched a data portal similar DC's in 2009.