Rakuten to invest over $100 million in India, expand workforce by 8% in 2025
New Delhi: Japanese internet major Rakuten plans to invest at least $100 million in India this year and increase its workforce by 8% as it looks to bolster global operations from its key tech hub in the country, a top executive told Reuters.
The investment will be used to expand infrastructure, accelerate hiring and enhance technological capabilities, particularly around artificial intelligence, Rakuten India CEO Sunil Gopinath told Reuters.
While he declined to disclose an exact figure, he described the planned outlay as “at least three-digit millions dollars.”
The company, which spans fintech, e-commerce, and telecom, is integrating AI across core areas including customer experience, internal business tools, and employee productivity.
“We look for AI-savvy people that we can intersperse across the company,” Gopinath said, adding that Rakuten seeks to hire “power users” of AI.
Currently, Rakuten employs around 4,000 people in India—90% of them tech professionals.
The country’s Global Capability Centre (GCC) contributes to nearly half of the company’s 70-plus businesses, with multiple offices including two in Bengaluru.
India's GCC also played a key role in building Rakuten Pay, a leading payments app in Japan, and SixthSense, a system-monitoring platform that predicts and flags issues in advance.
“It (SixthSense) is almost like Sherlock Holmes, so we are able to figure out not only what has happened automatically, but we can actually project and predict an issue happening before it happens,” Gopinath said.
Clients of the SixthSense platform include banks, airlines, healthcare providers, and the Government of India.
Rakuten earned 10.5 billion yen ($73.62 million) in profit in FY2024 through AI use, and plans to double this figure in 2025.
According to its latest earnings presentation, AI tools helped cut employee time spent creating sales material by nearly half last year.
According to a Nasscom-Zinnov report, the market for Global Capability Centres in India is expected to grow from $64.6 billion in FY2024 to as much as $105 billion by FY2030.
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