Somnath Banerjee

Somnath is a Technology Partner and Chief Data Scientist at Clear, where he focuses on advancing the AI capabilities of the Clear engineering platform and delivering deeper and more comprehensive insights about companies and individuals.
These insights are vital for Clear and its portfolio companies to gain access to the most relevant sourcing, customers, talents, and capital.
Somnath brings decades of experience in building AI/ML-based products at various organizations.
Prior to Clear, he helped build Pinterest shopping grounds up.
His team was responsible for Pinterest shopping discovery which includes product search, recommendation, and personalization across Pinterest.
Under his leadership, the number of shoppers on Pinterest increased from 1% to 30%, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenue.
Before joining Pinterest, Somnath spent more than seven years at Walmart Labs.
There he helped set up the Walmart Labs in Bangalore, led various data science organizations, and modernized the Walmart.com search tech stack by applying AI/ML.
Additionally, at Google, he was the founding member of the WebP team which has become a widely-used image format on the internet.
Somnath holds a Ph.D.
in machine learning and information retrieval from BITS Pilani and a Master’s degree in computer science from IIT Kharagpur.
He has published papers in top-tier conferences, such as SIGIR and WWW, and has given invited talks on e-commerce search and recommendation.
When Somnath is not working he can be found biking with his kids or participating in hiking meetup events.