 "Founder Profile: Meet Sunny Rao, the technology innovator")
Sunny Balijepalli Rao is co-founder and CEO of ZoomIn.com, a photo sharing and printing service. Before ZoomIn, Sunny co-founded Half.com, one of the largest sellers of used books, movies and music in the world, where he was Chief Technology Officer. Computerworld named Sunny a Premier 100 IT Leader in its annual ranking of Information Technology leaders. Half.com was acquired by eBay in July 2000 in a transaction valued at over $350 million. After the acquisition, Sunny remained with eBay to integrate the two companies’ technologies. Since leaving eBay in 2003, Sunny has been an active angel investor and advisor in a number of technology start-ups.
Prior to Half.com, Sunny spent six years at Infonautics, where he designed and built the Sleuth product line and managed the operations of the Electric Library, a subscription service similar to LexisNexis. He is also part of US-based venture capital firm First Round Capital.
Sunny has a Master of Science degree in Information Systems from Drexel University.
Sunny splits his time between Philadelphia and Mumbai. More in Philadelphia because of his daughter’s school schedule