Raghav Shankar
Engineer who sells. Salesperson who builds.
Raghav Shankar is co-founder of CheckMarque AI.
Where CheckMarque started
By day he sells the materials most people have never heard of and cannot live without: what goes inside chips, cars and electronics. Since 2024 he has done it at Krayden Europe (formerly CAPLINQ), first running a European territory as a sales application engineer and, since August 2026, leading European commercial operations. His accounts have included ASML, Apple, Bosch, TDK and Red Bull Racing. Qualification cycles run for years, and engineering and procurement both sit at the table.
Midway through one evaluation, a buyer challenged his team's expertise using an AI's summary of the company as the reference point. Nobody on the selling side knew what that summary said. That moment is where CheckMarque started.
He builds what he writes about
If something is eating time, he engineers a fix. Much of his team's commercial work now runs on AI tooling he built: agents working inside Salesforce, and a retrieval agent that gives sales instant answers from company knowledge. Work that took hours each week now takes minutes. It gives him a working view of what these models can and cannot do, which he trusts more than any pitch deck.
The long way round
He sold websites to businesses as a teenager, before most people called that a job. He ran dropshipping and print-on-demand operations, and learned that what customers say they want and what they actually buy are two different sentences. When India demonetised its currency overnight in 2016, he was on the ground helping local businesses keep trading. At an education company in Chennai he went from intern to programme manager in two years, growing the business across eight countries.
He studied computer science, then took a Master's in Management of Technology at TU Delft, where the lesson was that the best technology rarely wins; the technology that explains itself best usually does. He has spent time in China and a semester in Seoul, and today works with teams across Europe, the US and Asia.
Elsewhere
He writes (Half)Decided, about business, people, AI and the gap between what people know and what they actually decide. He is based in Amsterdam.
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