Walmart Global Tech

Walmart Global Tech (abbreviated as WGT; formerly Walmart Labs and Kosmix)^[7] is the technology arm of Walmart Inc. ^[8] and functions as a large-scale engineering and business services organization that powers the company's global retail operations.^[9]

Its origins trace back to 2005, when Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman founded Kosmix, a social media and search startup.^[10] In April 2011, Walmart acquired Kosmix and used it as the foundation to establish @WalmartLabs, a dedicated research and innovation division focused on advancing the company's digital capabilities.^{[11] [12]}

Over time, Walmart expanded and restructured its technology operations, and in 2016 it merged Walmart Labs with its Information Systems Division (ISD) to create a unified organization called Walmart Technology.^[13] This move was aimed at better integrating digital and physical retail systems, improving coordination between online platforms and in-store operations.

In August 2020, Walmart Technology launched its new identity as Walmart Global Tech as part of a new technology and shared services organization within the world's largest retailer.^[14] WGT currently manages a sophisticated infrastructure that handles over 100 billion data points and millions of document loads every second.

In 2025, Walmart officially merged its separate technology and AI teams into a consolidated organization^[15] and further in May 2026, Walmart is officially merging its global technology and product teams into a unified structure.^[16]

Harinarayan and Rajaraman were co-founders of Junglee, the first shopping search engine which was acquired by Amazon.com in 1998.^[17] They later created Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk ^[18] and started an early-stage VC fund, Cambrian Ventures, that backed several companies later acquired by Google.^[19]

Kosmix expanded its focus from vertical to a horizontal search engine in June 2008, covering all subjects.^[20] For a key word or topic that a user enters, "Kosmix gathers content from across the Web to build a sort of multimedia encyclopedia entry on the fly. The company has built a taxonomy of nearly five million categories on a wide range of topics. The taxonomy includes millions of connections mapping the relationship among those categories."^[21]

In June 2007, Kosmix announced a partnership with Revolution Health, in which Revolution Health will utilize Kosmix to enhance content searches on RevolutionHealth.com.^[22]

Truveo announced in September 2007 that the company's video search engine is being used by Kosmix to present topic-relevant videos on its health site RightHealth, giving users a starting point to explore health topics.^[23] As of March 2008, Kosmix' market-share had grown 730% year-over-year.^[24] RightHealth was the #2 health site on the Web, according to Hitwise. Kosmix launched a personal news site called MeeHive in March, 2008 which is similar to Google News or My Yahoo!, but allows users to customize their interests to a greater degree.^[21] Meehive was shut down in October 2010.^[25] Kosmix launched tweetbeat in June 2010 as it entered the social media arena.^[26]

In October 2009, Kosmix acquired Cruxlux, an engine designed to take any two people, places, or things and tell the user how they are connected. Cruxlux was founded in 2007 by Guha Jayachandran and Curtis Spencer and was in private beta at the time of the acquisition.^[27] The terms of the deal are mostly unknown, other than that it was made in both cash and stock.^[28]

In April 2011, Kosmix announced a partnership with Ask The Doctor, in which their website AskTheDoctor.com would provide Q & A format medical content for Kosmix's website RightHealth.^[29]

Kosmix was acquired by Walmart^[30] in April 2011^[31] and became @WalmartLabs for a rumored amount of 300ドル million.^{[32] [33] [34]} In June 2012, Harinarayan and Rajaraman announced that they would be leaving the company to take some time off, with no immediate plans.^[35]

In June 2013, Walmart bought predictive intelligence startup Inkiru to add analytics capabilities.^[36] In June 2018, Walmart announced it would hire 2,000 additional employees into Walmart Labs to improve the company's online grocery shopping platform.^[37] In July 2019, it acquired health tech startup FloCare and B2B wholesale trading platform BigTrade to bolster its customer service.^{[38] [39]}

Some products developed at Walmart Labs are Social Genome, ShoppyCat, and Get on the Shelf.^{[40] [41]}

In 2020, Walmart Labs launched its new global identity as Walmart Global Tech.^[42] Walmart Global Tech develops and manages the foundational technologies on which Walmart Inc.'s customer experiences are built, including cloud, data, enterprise architecture, DevOps, infrastructure and security. The tech organization powers Walmart Inc. and its business units, including Walmart U.S., Sam's Club and Walmart International. It is also an enterprise services organization that develops solutions to help 2.3 million Walmart and Sam's Club associates work and live better.

The domains under Global Tech are -

• Customer Experience (CX) and Merchant Tech - The Customer Engagement Services (CES) is located in the Walmart Change Office Building at the new 350-acre Walmart Home Office campus.
• Supply Chain and Fulfillment Tech
• Global Marketplace and Merchant Tech
• Data and Global AI Operations
• Infrastructure, Cloud and DevOps
• Information Security and Governance
• Enterprise Services / Associate Tech

Since 2021, WGT has collaborated with IBM to explore supply chain use cases and customer personalization.

In 2022, Walmart introduced Element as a proprietary, internal, multi-cloud, end-to-end machine learning platform. It was designed specifically to build, scale, and manage AI and GenAI applications across Walmart.^[43]

In August 2025, Walmart introduced an internal "super agent" for engineers called Wibey, designed to streamline and coordinate the work of over 200 separate AI agents already in use across the company.^[44] The company built Wallaby, a collection of retail-focused LLMs designed to provide highly contextual responses for customer and associate experiences.^[45]

In June 2025, Walmart launched Sparky, an agentic, generative AI shopping assistant. The GenAI assistant was designed to bypass traditional keyword search by offering conversational, hyper-personalized planning and product recommendations.

Marty is AI "super agent," designed to help advertisers and sellers simplify campaigns, manage ad setups, and gain personalized performance insights.^[46]

Code Puppy is an open-source, AI-powered coding agent initially developed internally which was first created and released as an open-source tool in 2025. It functions as a "vibe-coding" assistant designed to let users generate code, build automations, and deploy applications using natural language. it was built as a lightweight, open-source alternative to commercial IDEs like Cursor and Windsurf.^{[47] [48]}

The head of the Global Tech is the Global Chief Technology Officer (CTO), and Chief Development Officer of Walmart Inc..^{[49] [50]}

The Global Tech associates are based in US, India, Mexico, Costa Rica and Israel.^{[51] [52]}

In May 2026, there was a major organizational overhaul designed to streamline operations by merging the company's global technology, product, design, and AI teams into a single, unified system across Walmart U.S., Sam's Club, and international divisions.

In India, Walmart Global Tech has partnered with the Indian Institute of Technology Madras to accelerate research in new areas of technology^[53] and also with Indian Institute of Science to launch the Walmart Centre for Tech Excellence.^[54]

In 2025, Walmart partnered with OpenAI to create a AI-First shopping experiences, starting with allowing customers and members to soon shop Walmart through ChatGPT using Instant Checkout.^[55] In March 2026, Walmart discontinued the exclusive "Instant Checkout" feature within ChatGPT.^[56]

• Navigating the New Retail Landscape - A Guide for Business Leaders (Publisher: Oxford University Press; ISBN 9780198868767)
• Likeable Business: Why Today's Consumers Demand More and How Leaders Can Deliver (Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education; ISBN 9780071800471)
• Reengineering Retail - The Future of Selling in a Post-Digital World (Publisher: Figure 1 Publishing; ISBN 9781927958803)
• Strategic Social Media - From Marketing to Social Change (Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated; ISBN 9781119890386)

• Walmart Global Tech
• Walmart Inc. Corporate website
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