Ex-Xiaomi exec Manu Jain joins Abu Dhabi-based G42 as India CEO

Former India head of Xiaomi, Manu Kumar Jain, is joining G42 as the new CEO of its India business. Abu Dhabi-based G42 is an artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing company that is set to expand to India.

“After building the largest smartphone company and one of the biggest fashion e-commerce companies in India, I am embarking on a new and exciting adventure. I am delighted to announce that I am joining G42, a leading global AI company, to kickstart a new AI business in India!,” Jain said in his LinkedIn post.

Jain left Xiaomi in January, ending his nine-year stint with the company. He joined the smartphone company at the time it was finding its foothold in the Indian market. At the time of his departure from Xiaomi, he held the post of global vice president and was based in Dubai. In the past, he co-founded the fashion and lifestyle e-commerce portal Jabong. 

“We are thrilled to share that we will be soon expanding our operations into India, as we continue our journey towards becoming a global leader in AI. Leading us into this new chapter of G42's growth story is Jain, a name synonymous with transformative leadership and ground-breaking success in the consumer technology sector,” G42 posted on its social media handles. 

On 30 August, Inception, a G42 company announced the open-source release of Jain, an Arabic large language model (LLM). As per the company statement, Jain is a 13-billion parameter model trained on 395-billion-token Arabic and English dataset. Further, in September, G42 and Microsoft expanded their partnership to include cloud offerings and AI capabilities. The two firms will also be working together to expand existing data centre infrastructure in the UAE.