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Rocket Fuel Powers Up Technology Team, Stanford PhD Manu Thapar to Lead Research & Development
[December 18, 2014]

Rocket Fuel Powers Up Technology Team, Stanford PhD Manu Thapar to Lead Research & Development


Rocket Fuel (NASDAQ: FUEL), a leading provider of artificial intelligence (AI) advertising and marketing solutions for global agencies and brands, today announced Manu Thapar has joined the company as Senior Vice President of Research and Development. Manu joins Rocket Fuel with more than 20 years of technology management experience, working with major technology brands and leading large multinational engineering teams with as many as 500 engineers located across the U.S., India, China, and Europe. The Senior Vice President of Research and Development role is a newly created position that provides leadership for all of Rocket Fuel's technology teams.

Manu Thapar, Rocket Fuel Senior Vice President, Research & Development (Photo: Business Wire)

Manu Thapar, Rocket Fuel Senior Vice President, Research & Development (Photo: Business Wire)

"As we scale Rocket Fuel toward our $1B revenue goal across multiple product lines-all built on our core Big Data and machine-learning technology-we need an exemplary leader who can scale teams efficiently while providing technical depth and oversight for Big Data systems such as Rocket Fuel's," said George John, Rocket Fuel Chairman and CEO. "Manu's PhD from Stanford's engineering school set the foundation for his high-profile career leading engineering teams at some of the Valley's leading technology companies. He's done this while buildinga strong reputation for himself, growing top performing teams, and aligning engineering priorities with corporate goals to great success. Rocket Fuel's infrastructure represents one of the largest distributed computing systems1 in the world, and we look forward to his leadership at the helm of our technology team."



"Artificial intelligence and Big Data are terms that a lot of companies lay claim to without the results to match-Rocket Fuel is the real deal, with a cutting-edge AI platform that leads the industry in performance, service, and scale," said Manu. "This is a unique moment in history for marketers-the potential to deliver personalized consumer experiences across all touchpoints and platforms has never been greater than now, and machine learning plays a crucial role in scaling that 1-to-1 opportunity. I'm excited to join a world-class team that is transforming programmatic marketing while continuing to push of boundaries of innovation for global marketers."

Manu has an extensive background in distributed systems, and in scaling systems, platforms, and organizations. In his role as CTO at Angie's List, Manu led the technology, engineering, and product teams to incorporate new technologies for search, analytics, and new product areas such as e-commerce. He scaled end-to-end support and performance for the site in line with the company's growth and high performance requirements.


Prior to Angie's List, Manu served as Vice President at Yahoo!, where he led the technology team and developed foundational technologies for all of Yahoo's properties. Manu's previous work as Walmart.com's VP of engineering included the application of machine learning for e-commerce. He also held technology leadership roles at Acxiom, Cisco (News - Alert), HP, and Myspace.

About Rocket Fuel

Rocket Fuel delivers a leading programmatic media-buying platform at Big Data scale that harnesses the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to improve marketing ROI in digital media across web, mobile, video, and social channels. Rocket Fuel powers digital advertising and marketing programs globally for customers in North America, Europe, and APAC. Customers trust Rocket Fuel's Advertising That Learns® platform to achieve brand and direct-response objectives in diverse industries from luxury cars to financial services to retail. Rocket Fuel currently operates in more than 20 offices worldwide and trades on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the ticker symbol "FUEL." For more information, please visit http://www.rocketfuel.com or call 1-888-717-8873.

1. As measured in size by TeraFLOPs and CPU Cores, December 2014 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects


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