Raj Chowdhury

Early life and education

Chowdhury was born and raised in the city of Kolkata. He is the only child of Sukla Chowdhury, a former social worker and Joy Chowdhury, the owner of a construction company in India.

Chowdhury graduated from the School of Engineering at Tufts University. There, he worked at the Human Robot Interaction Lab researching affective control and evolution interactions between effect and cognitive robots for human robot interactions, developing multi-scale agent based cognitive modelling architecture for complex robots.

During his graduate research, he worked at the Microsystems Technology Lab (MTL) at MIT in the field of MEMS, electronic and photonics devices and nanotechnology areas. He was also a researcher at the Advanced Materials Processing Lab (AMPL) which fosters interdisciplinary research at the forefront of materials science.

Chowdhury attended The Fletcher School of International Law and Diplomacy, the oldest school in the United States dedicated solely to graduate studies in international affairs. He earned his MBA at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University.

Career

In 2005, he moved to San Jose, California, prior to that, he was in Boston. His first job in Silicon Valley was with Applied Materials.

HashCash Consultants

Chowdhury has taken up the role of Managing Director at HashCash Consultants, a Blockchain Technology company registered in US and India. It builds banking products that integrate with blockchain platforms such as Stellar (payment network), Ethereum, R3 (company) Corda, Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Sawtooth Lake. HashCash works with banks in Middle East, Singapore and India to integrate core banking systems to a middleware that allows for maximum reusability of their existing applications such as the ones that handle compliance and regulatory requirements. Its product portfolio includes blockchain based banking applications that handle Remittance, Trade finance, Payment processor and Payment Wallet. It runs a Bitcoin payment processor and cryptocurrency wallet in the US.

Innovation Head at ICICI Bank

Chowdhury headed the technical innovation team at ICICI Bank in Mumbai, India. This team is the first in the country and among a few globally to carry out cross border trade finance and remittance transaction using Blockchain technology with Emirates NBD. In addition, his team had put together programs that will let people transfer money inside and outside the country through the Stellar (payment network) blockchain platform, co-founded by Jed McCaleb. He is a founding member of BankChain, the Blockchain Consortium of Indian and Middle Eastern banks and financial institutions.

Fintech Investor

Chowdhury is an investor at Fintech companies focused in the area of Blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies and innovative payment solutions. His current portfolio of startups are working on creating Blockchain Technology solutions for financial institutions and supply chain companies, bitcoins marketplaces and payment processors and cryptocurrency wallets. Chowdhury's view on bitcoins and cryptocurrencies was stated in Economic Times publication and highlighted in his talk at Economic Times CIO forum.He is a foremost voice in crytoeconomics in India and engages with industry and government policy makers to create regulatory framework in the area of blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

Unification Energy

Chowdhury co-founded Unification Energy; a company which provides charging station infrastructure for electric vehicles. In addition, Unification installs solar panels at residences and businesses to offset additional electricity demanded by electric vehicles.

Shop-a-Block

In 2010, Chowdhury co-founded Shop-a-Block. This e-commerce venture became a profitable start up within nine months of inception.

Writing

Chowdhury authored the book The Dark Secret of the Silicon Valley, which is a true story of an immigrant who worked his way up to become the partner of a well-known venture capital firm in San Francisco. The majority owner of the firm, a notorious Silicon Valley billionaire, who is also an early investor in Google and Facebook, starts to think of him as his wunderkind and shares with him his darkest secrets of financial trickery. The unique and aggressive techniques used by this billionaire, revealed in this book, is cringe inducing and would leave the reader baffled as to what lengths this man would go to see his money grow.

Battery Replacement Unit

Inventors: Sagar Chandra, MS; Chowdhury, MS

The size of the battery pack and their arrangement decides the amount of total power and the voltage they can deliver to run a vehicle. These battery pack can vary in size based on the required capacity and can become very heavy. Handling of these battery packs, moving them around, accessing the vehicle to replace them are all part of the design challenges for the operation of a successful battery replacement unit.

This invention is a complete end to end solution from when the vehicle enters the Battery Replacement Unit with a used (discharged completely or partially) battery pack and leaves with a charged battery pack based on the requirement of the driver. The communication with the driver is established at the user interface and business transaction is implemented. Along with the design aspects of the system, the invention gives a detailed operational sequence for the battery replacement unit.

Power Enhancing Device

Inventors: Chowdhury, MS; Sumit Patankar, MS

The setup comprises mounted piezoelectric element placed under one or multiple keys of the keypad of a portable device (such as a laptop computer or a cell phone), which converts mechanical energy of typing into electrical energy. The electrical energy is then used to charge the Li-ion (or other batteries) of the portable device by the accompanying circuitry.

Social cause

Chowdhury is a member of the non-profit, Asha committed to the spread of education for children in emerging countries. He stewarded the After School Program at Gohaldanga village in West Bengal, India. The aim of the GRSV project is to promote education, ethics, health care and economy among these socially backward communities of Gohaldanga and the surrounding 20 villages.