sharunkanan. Get in touch
Bengaluru & Dubai · open to conversations
500+Brands engaged
400%Revenue growth
$2.5MRaise enabled

Hi, I’m

Sharun Kanan
Currently
Director, GTM
& Product
Evangelist

At Ctruh, a VC-backed deep-tech company building spatial and AI commerce for brands and retailers.

Also
Founder,
Askulia

Getting brands named when their buyers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini what to buy.

SharunKanan.

I take new categories to market, and I sell them before the category has a name.

Scroll ↓
Enterprise growth Immersive & AI commerce Investor relations Selling since 2016
BMW Group IndiaSaudi AramcoHansgrohe & AxorShapoorji PallonjiPuravankaraPhoenix MillsArk GroupStanley LifestylesTata CLiQBataCelloCampusSiyaramSunreef YachtsCREDAIAjnaLens91TrucksBluorng BMW Group IndiaSaudi AramcoHansgrohe & AxorShapoorji PallonjiPuravankaraPhoenix MillsArk GroupStanley LifestylesTata CLiQBataCelloCampusSiyaramSunreef YachtsCREDAIAjnaLens91TrucksBluorng
About

The short version

Trained as a mechanical engineer. Ended up selling. Best at the part where the buyer does not yet have a budget line for what you are selling.

The buyer has no budget line for it yet. That is the job.

Ten years in sales, most of it in rooms where the product had to be explained before it could be priced. Ed-tech through the boom and the correction, then deep tech. Today I sit in the founder's office at Ctruh and own enterprise growth: positioning, pricing, proposals and partnerships, the demos that close, and the investor conversations that fund the next year.

I have engaged more than five hundred brands across India, the Middle East and North America. Enterprise revenue at Ctruh grew over 400 percent on the accounts I brought in, and on the fundraising side I ran a hundred-plus investor pipeline, secured three term sheets and helped close a 2.5 million dollar round with minimal dilution.

Outside that I build. Askulia is my own AI search visibility business, built end to end and paid for out of my own pocket. Before it there was a leasing product I took to a working demo and then deliberately killed. The judgment to stop is the part I would keep.

IndiaMiddle EastNorth America
500+Brands engaged
$2.5MRound closed, 3 term sheets
400%Enterprise revenue growth
#2Product Hunt, product of the day
Work

What I take to market

The product is immersive and AI-generated commerce. My side of it is turning that into something a category head, a marketing director or a developer's sales team can actually buy.

Modern residential interior

XRealty

The real estate line. Browser-based 3D property tours, sales-gallery experiences and offline immersive expos for developers.

Real estateEnterprise
Product photography studio

Ctruh Studio

Turns one 2D product image into a 3D asset in seconds, then produces studio-grade product photography and every ad variant from it with brand rules locked. Second Product of the Day on Product Hunt, August 2026.

GenAIRetailProduct Hunt
Immersive LED room

Spaces

A productized immersive LED room for sales galleries and showrooms, sold as a repeatable install rather than a bespoke build every time.

Hardware
Footwear retail wall

Try-on & configurators

Virtual try-on for apparel, footwear and jewellery, and configurators for categories where the buyer wants to change something before committing.

D2CCommerce
Boardroom

Investor relations

A hundred-plus investor pipeline, three term sheets, diligence and data-room turnaround cut by 40 percent, and the narrative and financial materials behind a multi-round evaluation.

FundraisingFounder's office
Clients
BMW Group India
Saudi Aramco
Hansgrohe & Axor
Shapoorji Pallonji
Puravankara
Phoenix Mills
Ark Group
Stanley Lifestyles
Tata CLiQ
Bata
Cello
Campus
Siyaram
Sunreef Yachts
CREDAI
AjnaLens
91Trucks
Bluorng

A selection. Commercial terms, scope and deal status stay off this page.

Experience

The record

Ten years. Ed-tech through the boom and the correction, then deep tech. Every role was a category the buyer had to be taught first.

Sep 2023 → Now
Director, GTM & Product EvangelistCurrent
Ctruh Technologies · Bengaluru

Joined as Program Manager and moved into the director seat in January 2026. Enterprise growth from inside the founder’s office, partnering directly with the CEO: positioning, pricing, proposals and partnerships for an AI-powered XR commerce platform, plus investor relations and the demos that close.

  • Grew enterprise revenue over 400% through AR, VR and XR-led enterprise accounts
  • Ran a 100+ investor pipeline, secured 3 term sheets and helped close a $2.5M round with minimal dilution
  • Cut data-room turnaround by 40% and built the investor narrative and financial materials
  • Led sprint planning and cross-functional delivery on priority initiatives
Mar 2022 → Apr 2023
Category Lead, Influencer Management
Unacademy

Ran influencer partnerships and digital campaigns with a team under me, through the sector's hardest year.

  • 300% increase in revenue
  • Onboarded 130,000+ new users on GTM campaigns built end to end
  • Lifted influencer ROI from 1.1x to 6x through targeting and campaign optimisation
  • Piloted the Unacademy One event, end-to-end operations and celebrity coordination
Oct 2020 → Feb 2022
Senior Admissions Consultant
upGrad

Higher-ticket professional education. Longer cycles, adult buyers spending their own money on a career bet.

  • $80K in a single quarter at an industry-best 1.9% lead-to-conversion rate
  • Supported upGrad EMEA on international team building and sales process
May 2020 → Oct 2020
Sales Manager
Vedantu

K-12, at the point where the entire category moved to the phone overnight.

  • Managed a 10-member K-12 sales team, consistently meeting 100% of quota
  • Used analytics and performance tracking to improve pipeline health and outcomes
Aug 2019 → Mar 2020
Business Development Associate
BYJU'S

Where I learned volume, scripts and the discipline of a daily number.

  • Closed high-conversion K-12 and UPSC leads
  • Mentored new associates into permanent roles
2016 → 2017
Where it started
POSist Technologies · iimjobs.com

Solutions Consultant at POSist, selling real-time restaurant operations software to owners and prospecting more than 200 accounts across territory. Before that, Manager of Corporate Connect at iimjobs, winning new accounts through consistent outbound, engaging 50+ existing clients and renewing more than 60 percent of contracts.

2018 → 2020
MSc, Global Management
NEOMA Business School, Reims, France

Specialisation in International Business.

2012 → 2016
B.Tech, Mechanical Engineering
SRM University, Chennai

Four years of mechanical engineering, and far enough in to know it was not the path I wanted. The sponsorship work I did alongside it, for racing and tech teams and college events, turned out to be the real training.

Toolkit
Tools & languages
Certified in Advanced Branding and Project Management

Sales and CRM: Salesforce, Pipedrive, Freshsales, Leadsquared, Apollo.io, Lusha, Instantly. Productivity and AI: Notion, Google Workspace, Claude Code, SPSS. Design and 3D: Figma, Spline, Ctruh Studio.

EnglishMalayalamHindiTamilFrench
Ventures

Built myself

Outside the day job. My own money, my own nights, and one of them stopped on purpose.

Live · 2026

Askulia

Get named when your buyers ask AI.

Buyers have started asking ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini what to buy, and those engines hand back a shortlist. Askulia finds out whether a brand is on it, why it is not, and fixes it. I built the measurement method, the brand, the site, the pricing and the outbound.

  • A prompt pack brands run themselves to see, score and fix what AI says about them
  • A one-time visibility report scored across the three major answer engines
  • Done-for-you work and quarterly monitoring, scoped per client
askulia.com ↗
Active

Brand
Studio

Positioning, brand books and sites, in days.

A productized brand and marketing practice built on an AI-first workflow. Fixed packages, published scope, no open-ended discovery.

  • Brand positioning and strategy
  • Full identity systems and brand books
  • Landing pages and websites
  • 30-day content systems
Explored and stopped · 2026

Leasary

An AI leasing agent for flex real estate.

Taken to a working demo, a go-to-market plan and a warm pipeline, then deliberately shut down. Five hard problems at once is not something one person operates well, and the honest read was that it needed a team I did not have.

Contact

Let’s talk

Email
sharun@sharunkanan.com
LinkedIn
in/sharunkanan
Venture
askulia.com
Based in
Bengaluru & Dubai