Rakuten’s Rahul Atri wins 2020 FierceWireless top Rising Star

Linda Hardesty editor's corner

We’re proud to announce that the winner of this year’s FierceWireless Rising Star is Rakuten’s Rahul Atri.

Last week we published our story “FierceWireless presents its 2020 class of Rising Stars,” listing 10 top executives on the rise in the wireless industry. We had a great slate of young executives who were nominated by their companies and selected by the FierceWireless editors.

But after a week of voting in a community-rallying poll, Rakuten’s Rising Star came out on top with 16,229 votes.

Rahul Atri is definitely making a name for himself in the mobile ecosystem. As head of Rakuten Mobile’s Automation Center of Excellence (CoE), Atri is leading the charge on integrating artificial intelligence into the telecom network and implementing an end-to-end automation strategy.

“You will not see other telcos that have an Automation CoE,” he said. “That is something we take great pride in. We are building a model and hopefully making life easier for other operators, who will be able to follow our model.” You can read his full Rising Stars profile, here.

Atri hails from northern India and started his career working with greenfield telco operators and startups. He also worked alongside Rakuten Mobile CTO Tareq Amin when they were both at Reliance Jio, building the company’s very successful greenfield mobile network in India.

Congratulations to Rahul Atri. And thanks to all the Fierce readers who voted for their favorite 2020 Rising Star.

Here are the full results:

FW Poll