Mews appoints Kirupa Pushparaj as Chief Legal Officer to lead legal and compliance strategy at global scale

Pushparaj reports to Richard Valtr, founder of Mews, and will lead the company's legal, compliance, and policy functions as it navigates an increasingly complex global regulatory environment.

Richard Valtr, founder of Mews, said: "This has been a long search, and intentionally so. The CLO is a defining leadership role for Mews – one that will shape how we navigate some of the most important and complex projects ahead of us. Kirupa is exactly what we were looking for: a business-first legal leader who has spent his career enabling category-defining products in highly regulated environments. He also brings a rare depth of engineering and legal expertise, earning his law degree while working full-time as an engineer at Intel, before going on to spend over two decades as a senior legal leader scaling technology companies in highly regulated spaces."

Pushparaj spent over eight years at Square – now Block – as Deputy General Counsel, helping steer the company through its IPO in 2015, and some of its most complex product launches and market initiatives, including crypto and emerging technologies. Before that, Kirupa also served as CLO at Step, a fintech unicorn later acquired by Beast Industries, where he had responsibility for legal, compliance, people, government affairs and strategic partnerships.

Earlier in his career, Pushparaj held legal counsel roles at Amazon Lab126, the research and development company behind Amazon's consumer electronics, and spent six years as a hardware engineer at Intel.

He holds a J.D. from the University of the Pacific, an M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from PSG College of Technology. Kirupa also holds leadership roles across the industry, with board and advisory positions at multiple AI and legal tech companies and an adjunct professorship at the law schools of Stanford and the University of California, Davis.

Kirupa Pushparaj, Chief Legal Officer at Mews, on his appointment: "Few companies operate across the geographies, payment rails and regulatory regimes that Mews does, and that is exactly the type of complexity I am excited to work on. Hospitality has always been part of my life, so joining a company redefining what an operating system for this industry can look like is a genuine opportunity and I'm looking forward to what comes next."

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