Asha Vellaikal

Asha Vellaikal is Managing Director & Global Head of Digital Labs for Marsh, part of Marsh & McLennan companies with responsibilities for building the Labs and leading the innovation strategy to enable the next-generation of Insurance products. Her primary focus areas include emerging technologies such as Blockchain, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and IoT.

Previously, Asha was at Orange Silicon Valley as Director of Strategy and Innovation. At Orange, she built and led a cross-functional team focusing on developing novel B2C and B2B2C products across mobile, web, smart-home and big-data analytics space. She also led extensive Silicon Valley ecosystem outreach to identify companies for partnership and co-development. She also advised corporate strategy at the CxO level especially on emerging technologies and business trends.

Prior to that, Asha was research program manager at Orange/France Telecom managing worldwide projects in the areas of web2.0 and social computing. She has also worked in research, system architecture and engineering management positions at various other startup and Fortune 500 companies.

Asha holds a B.Tech from IIT Bombay and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from USC, where she was a Howard Hughes Doctoral Fellow. She is the author of nine issued USPTO patents and has authored more than fifteen refereed publications.