Prasad Ram

Prasad Ram (aka Pram) is the founder and CEO of Gooru, a non-profit education technology start-up. Ram previously worked at Xerox PARC, Dynamx Technology (co-founder), Yahoo! and Google.

Ram was born in Tiptur of Karnataka state in southern India. He obtained his B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 1987. He then went on to pursue his master's degree (M.S) and Ph.D. in Computer Science, from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Ram joined Yahoo!, as a chief technology officer of Yahoo! India in April 2004. He led the creation of products (Yahoo! Audio/Image search, Yahoo! 360, and Yahoo! Hotjobs) and platforms (Spam Filtering, Behavioral Targeting, Mobile Data Analysis, Vertical Search, Content Management). He joined Google as the head and site director at Google's India research and development centre in Bangalore in October 2006.

While working at Google, Ram devised a prototype to address a problem that he had perceived students and teachers both shared in the present day; that of easily finding age- and topic-appropriate educational resources on the web. He believed that existing search engines and similar resources were too commercially orientated (i.e. biased towards the goal of facilitating online advertisers) when it came to using big data to support what he believes is the "human right to education".

What began as a "20% effort" evolved into a year-long pilot in India that included 1,000 students across 25 classrooms. Ram subsequently left Google to pursue Gooru.

In August 2016, it was announced Gooru would be partnering with the LMS developer itslearning to create 35 curriculum courses using Gooru's extensive content catalog.