Raina Kumra is the secretary of the board of directors at Data & Society. She is concurrently an early stage technology investor with The Fund, the founder of Spicewell, a functional foods company (because Big Food requires as much attention as Big Tech and Big Pharma), and CEO of Juggernaut, a digital and organizational transformation bureau helping organizations be more human. As a technology ethics advocate, she created the EthicalOS framework (which has been taught in universities the world over, and downloaded over 750,00 times) and an accompanying course on LinkedIn Learning to help makers, investors, and consumers get up to speed on data ethics and mitigate unintended consequences of new technologies. She currently serves as an Advisor to Google X, Alphabet’s Moonshot Factory. She also helps a select group of climate and technology funds with their fundraising, holding both her Series 63 and 82 licenses. Raina’s curiosity about regulation led her to take those exams to understand parallels between technology and financial regulation.
In the past she served on the Biden-Harris transition team overseeing US Global Media’s technology strategy for Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia and other radio and television networks. Prior to joining The Fund as Partner, Raina led strategy and investments for the Tech Ethics portfolio at Omidyar Network where she funded an ecosystem for change in technology and helped build a cultural movement in tech through acts like helping originate the Should This Exist podcast, and funding The Center for Humane Technology. Just before joining Omidyar, Raina co-founded Mavin, a mobile startup focused on affordable internet access with an alternative and fair ad model.
She previously served as Co-Director of Innovation at the BBG, the world’s largest international media organization under the Obama Administration and served at the U.S. Department of State in a diplomatic innovation role. Prior to that Raina led the conversion of Wieden+Kennedy New York to a full-service digital agency in her role as Director of Digital Strategies & spent over a decade in digital advertising working with brands such as Burberry, Match, Johnnie Walker, Coke, Axe, Nike, Nokia, Levi’s, Unilever & ESPN. She is a member of the Ad Council’s issue advisory board and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
She has keynoted and spoken at several conferences on a range of topics from motherhood to venture, ethics, entrepreneurship, activism and diversity, and conducted workshops for several Fortune 500 companies on the same. Her talks have been heard at Melbourne Knowledge Week, SXSW, Fast Company Summit, and she has debated at the Cambridge Union on the merits of ethical AI. Her entrepreneurial and advocacy work has been featured in TechCrunch WIRED, and Forbes. She’s written for publications such as Columbia Journalism Review, Quartz and Slate. She advises companies across healthcare and gaming on their approaches to a changing world.
Raina holds degrees from Boston University in Film Production, NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She was named a Most Creative Person in Business by Fast Company and her work has been featured in the MoMA permanent collection.