Fremont: California-based Indian founded Topsy Labs, a startup that builds a business around a real-time social search and analytics platform, has hired Duncan Greatwood as its new CEO. Prior to joining Topsy, Greenwood worked as an executive in Cisco Systems.

Greatwood was the Founder and CEO of PostPath, a maker of collaboration and calendaring software that was acquired by Cisco for $215 million in 2008. Talking about stepping down from his position, the former CEO and Co-Founder of Topsy, Vipul Ved Prakash, says, “I decided to focus my time on providing leadership over Topsy’s technology platform and engineering. My new position with Topsy Labs is now Chief Technology Officer.”

Co-Founded in May 2009, by Vipual Ved Prakash, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Gary Iwatani and Scott Banister, Topsy Labs enables businesses around the globe to apply social intelligence to realtime decisioning. The Topsy platform powers the leading realtime social search engine for consumers and their API is used by some of the world’s largest online publishers, search engines, content aggregators and marketers, with more than a half-billion queries processed per month.  

Prakash , who currently holds the position of CTO in Topsy, said, “Duncan brings over twenty years of executive leadership experience in high-growth, technology companies and has a unique blend of sales, marketing, operations and technical prowess. Duncan’s extensive knowledge and expertise of the industry was really appealing to Topsy Labs and will benefit the company’s future growth.”

When asked if this will be the beginning of a major change or shift in direction for his company, Prakash says, “No, Topsy Labs has been on a successful trajectory for quite some time and Duncan’s role will help the company continue this growth, more specifically, continue developing its analytic products and services across the globle.”

Prakash is a pioneer in the field of collaborative filtering. In 2001, he co-founded Cloudmark to create an Internet scale version of his open-source spam filter, Vipul’s Razor. Prior to this, Prakash was an engineer at Napster and was named one of the Top 100 Young Innovators in the world by MIT Technology Review. Before moving to the Bay Area, he co-founded Sense/Net, a popular ISP in India, and worked for Silicon Graphics, NIIT, BPL and TradeIndia. Prakash holds multiple patents for his work on document classification and anonymous data pooling.

With a headcount of 38 employees, Topsy has raised $30 million in total capital to date. Most recently, in March 2011, Topsy raised $15 million in a Series C round led by BlueRun Ventures with prior investors Western Technology Investments, Ignition Partners, Founders Fund and Scott Banister, the founder of Ironport, participating.