Watch: Walmart Labs Technology VP Rohit Kaila on the future of retail

The India division of Walmart Labs, which is the product development arm of Bentonville, Arkansas-based retail giant Walmart, provides retail technology across its brick-and-mortar stores, apps and online presence globally.

With a little over 4,000 software engineers, data scientists, designers and product managers, Walmart Labs India has offices across Bengaluru, Gurugram, and Chennai.

Last year, it acqui-hired two India-based startups to strengthen its omni-channel customer experience capabilities -- Bengaluru-based wholesale trading platform BigTrade and healthtech firm FloCare. In the same period, it also acqui-hired Bengaluru-based data annotation startup Dataturks.

Having begun operations in 2011 in India, Walmart Lab’s product development supports most of Walmart’s global operations. 

Supply chain and marketplace products for retail, Walmart’s health and wellness arm and the overall digital infrastructure and cloud platform of the retail giant are some of the core focus areas of Walmart Labs India, VP of Technology Rohit Kaila told TechCircle in an interview.

In the interview, Kaila shed light on Walmart Labs’s business continuity strategy during the lockdown, various use cases of the products it has built so far and the future of retail.

Prior to joining Walmart Labs in 2017, Kaila worked across several industries such as online software with Intuit, internet with Yahoo, telecom with Motorola and Lucent, core research with Bell Labs, among other advanced technology startups in India and the United States.