Ashwin Kulkarni · Bengaluru, India
Director, AI & Engineering at Demandbase

I build AI systems that scale and deliver.

18+ years across engineering, AI/ML, and product leadership. Today I lead Agentbase, DB AI Chat, and Technographics at Demandbase — owning enterprise AI platforms with globally distributed teams across the US, India, and Russia.

18+
Years building
2x
Co-Founder
$10M+
Revenue owned
1M/sec
Scaled to

Engineering and AI. Built hands-on.

I lead AI & Engineering at Demandbase, owning Agentbase (our enterprise multi-agent platform), DB AI Chat (a unified conversational layer over the product suite), and Technographics (TB-scale signal intelligence).

Before that, I scaled a data science platform at Embibe from ~100 to ~1M users/sec, served as VP Engineering at FundsCorner helping build an INR 90 Cr loan book, co-founded Gathr and 501 Labs, and started out at Tech Mahindra delivering enterprise systems for British Telecom.

I specialize in turning raw data into scalable AI products, orchestrating intelligent agents that think and act, and building 0→1 in high-stakes environments.

Currently
Agentic AI Multi-Agent Orchestration MCP A2A Protocols LLMs / RAG Semantic Search AI Observability
Foundations
Python Go Java FastAPI PyTorch AWS Kubernetes Kafka PostgreSQL MongoDB Neo4j

Ideas I'm chasing right now.

01

Agentic AI breaks traditional observability.

Metrics, traces, and logs were designed for deterministic services. Multi-agent systems are non-deterministic, multi-step, and self-correcting — which means we need new primitives for trust, evaluation, and debuggability. We're building them at Demandbase.

02

"Just use GPT-4" doesn't scale to enterprise.

Real enterprise AI needs retrieval you can trust, a semantic control plane over your actual data, evaluation you can defend to legal, and latency budgets that survive production traffic. The interesting work starts after the model call.

03

Semantic control planes are the next data abstraction.

Feature stores solved ML training. The next layer — a queryable, governed semantic map over thousands of tables and columns — is what lets agents act deterministically over messy, real-world data. This is the piece most enterprise AI stacks are still missing.

Built across 18 years.

2021 — Present
Demandbase · Bengaluru / Global

Director, AI & Engineering

Progressed through Principal Data Scientist → Senior Data Science Manager → Director.

Lead AI and engineering across Agentbase, DB AI Chat, and Technographics. Own architecture and delivery for products contributing $10M+ in annual revenue; manage globally distributed teams across US, India, and Russia.

2019 — 2021
Embibe (Reliance Jio) · Bengaluru

Lead Data Scientist — AI Platform & Search

Led the AI Data Science Platform and Search. Re-architected search, shipped Search V2, and scaled the platform from ~100 to ~1M users/sec. Partnered with ex-Pinterest / Walmart Labs search leaders.

2017 — 2019
FundsCorner · Bengaluru

Vice President of Engineering

Built AI/ML & computer-vision for credit scoring, KYC, and cheque parsing. Designed microservices & serverless on AWS. Helped build a ~INR 90 Cr loan book and supported 20× business growth.

2011 — 2017
Gathr · 501 Labs · Bengaluru + Mumbai

2x Co-Founder

Co-founded Gathr (social discovery; national press coverage, full-stack ownership) and 501 Labs (product studio shipping iOS, Android, and web products). Built stacks, shipped products, grew users.

2007 — 2011
Tech Mahindra · Bengaluru

Started here — Software Engineer (Java)

Delivered enterprise systems for British Telecommunications. Foundations in large-scale engineering & delivery discipline.

A few things I've built & led.

Enterprise AI · Present

Agentbase by Demandbase

A system of connected AI agents for B2B go-to-market. Multi-agent orchestration, A2A protocols, MCP, a unified data foundation, and enterprise-grade governance & observability.

Read more →
Conversational AI · Present

DB AI Chat

Unified conversational layer across the Demandbase suite. Multi-agent orchestration + semantic control plane over thousands of tables & columns delivering low-latency, deterministic, context-aware outputs.

Explore Demandbase →
Co-Founder · 2015–2017

Gathr

Social discovery app for casual, short-notice activities. Built the entire stack — backend, web, native Android. Grew to 2,500+ users with national press coverage across The Hindu, Economic Times, Deccan Herald, and more.

See project →
Data Intelligence · Present

Technographics

TB-scale signal intelligence powering Demandbase's account intelligence. Own the platform end-to-end — pipelines, models, and a semantic layer that turns billions of raw signals into reliable, queryable B2B truth.

Read more →
AI Platform & Search · 2019–2021

Embibe — Search V2

Re-architected the AI Data Science Platform & Search at Embibe (Reliance Jio). Shipped Search V2 and scaled from ~100 to ~1M users/sec, partnering with ex-Pinterest and Walmart Labs search leaders.

Read more →
VP Engineering · 2017–2019

FundsCorner — Credit AI

Built AI/ML and computer vision for credit scoring, KYC, and cheque parsing. Designed microservices & serverless architecture on AWS that helped grow a ~INR 90 Cr loan book and supported 20× business growth.

Read more →

Gathr, in national press.

The Hindu Economic Times Deccan Herald The New Indian Express Deccan Chronicle LBB Bangalore Epicure The Inkline

Let's talk shop.

Always happy to connect with builders working on enterprise AI, agentic systems, and 0→1 products.