Prosus names Euro Beinat chief AI officer, Paul van der Boor CTO, Nalden CPO

MUMBAI: Prosus is putting its AI ambitions into overdrive, naming a three-member leadership team to steer artificial intelligence, technology and product development as the company looks to accelerate AI-led growth across its ecosystem.

The company has appointed Euro Beinat as chief AI officer and Paul van der Boor as chief technology officer, while entrepreneur and investor Nalden, also known as Ronald Hans, joins as chief product officer.

The trio will lead Prosus’s AI strategy and focus on building and shipping products for partners and small and medium-sized enterprises across its extended ecosystem.

Prosus said it has spent years building technology across businesses including iFood, OLX and PayU, using real-world customer interactions to train and develop AI systems.

The company said this work has resulted in a unified intelligence layer based on commerce behaviour from its one billion customers. The new leadership team will focus on turning that intelligence into products for customers and partners across the ecosystem.

Prosus CEO Fabricio Bloisi said the appointments bring together product expertise and access to a large commerce data set.

“With this team we plug the best product leadership in Europe into one of the biggest commerce data sets in the world. I want Prosus to ship like a startup and learn like a platform, ten times faster,” Bloisi said.

Euro Beinat, who joined Prosus in 2018, will take on the newly created role of chief AI officer. He has built the company’s AI team and systems and will now focus on developing what Prosus describes as a leading AI Lab in Europe.

Beinat said Prosus’s AI systems have been developed around real commerce activity, giving the company an opportunity to apply its research and data analysis across its businesses.

“Prosus has built some of the most robust AI systems in Europe,” Beinat said, adding that its systems learn from how people actually buy, sell and run businesses.

He described the new role as an opportunity for AI specialists to work on problems emerging from the company’s large-scale commerce ecosystem.

Paul van der Boor has been promoted from vice president of AI to chief technology officer. He has worked across the Prosus group in Europe, Brazil and India, developing technology aimed at delivering measurable business impact.

Paul van der Boor said Prosus’s reach across Latin America, India and Europe gives the company a large base of users and products from which to build.

“I couldn’t be more excited to be working alongside Euro and Nalden, during what is certainly the most interesting time in history to be a builder,” Paul van der Boor said.

He said his ambition was to develop products capable of continuing to create value for users more than a decade from now, while positioning Prosus as one of the technology companies shaping the next wave of innovation.

Nalden, whose real name is Ronald Hans, joins Prosus as chief product officer. He co-founded WeTransfer in 2009 and helped build the file-sharing platform into a global product used by tens of millions of people.

He later became a founder and investor across Europe’s technology ecosystem, including through Boomerang.

At Prosus, Nalden will focus on product development and the customer experience, bringing his founder-led approach to a much larger technology ecosystem.

“I care about the customer, the moment they first use the product through to when they put it down at the end of the day,” Nalden said.

He added that his approach remains rooted in building products that people want to recommend, drawing on the lessons from WeTransfer and Boomerang.

The appointments come as Prosus seeks to turn its scale, technology capabilities and commerce data into a broader AI-led product engine, with the company aiming to move faster while building products designed for long-term use.