San Francisco Bay Area

Vivek Raghunathan

Engineer · Founder · Angel Investor

20 years building systems where failure isn't an option.

↓

Introduction

I’ve spent about 20 years building systems where failure isn’t an option — from device drivers on educational tablets to AI platforms inside large financial institutions.

I was employee #2 at Kno, where we grew engineering to 80 and were acquired by Intel. At Intel I led the backend for an education platform serving 100K+ students. Founding-team engineering roles at Togg and Success4 followed, and for the past eight years I’ve been CTO at Decision Minds, putting data and AI to work inside financial institutions.

Today I’m co-founding Adalma AI: agentic AI for credit unions and community banks, built so the work stands up to an examiner. On the side, I angel invest in infrastructure and AI, and I build things — trading systems, agents, apps — mostly because I can’t help it.

Career

Two decades, one throughline: systems that can't fail.

  1. 2026 — Present

    Adalma AI

    Co-Founder

    • Compliance-first AI for credit unions and community banks — compliance enforced before the action, not caught after
    • Tamper-evident audit trails an examiner can verify, running in your environment

    CernioCuraSentraTessra

  2. 2018 — Present

    Decision Minds

    CTO & Client Partner

    • Putting data and AI to work inside large financial institutions for seven years
    • Replaced the company's entire HRMS, CRM, recruitment, and expenses suite with homegrown platforms — Keta and a purpose-built CRM — sharing one common data platform and saving close to $60K a year in SaaS spend
    • Keta covers the full employee lifecycle: payroll, expenses, approval flows, FDE programs, e-signatures (replacing Eversign/Xodo), and SharePoint integration
    • Employees submit time and expenses straight from WhatsApp — with a Teams bot alongside for the rest of the day-to-day
    • The CRM runs the full sales pipeline with an Outlook plugin, a Chrome extension for LinkedIn, and enrichment from Apollo and other data sources
    • Roadmap: agentic automation woven through the entire suite

  3. 2018 — 2026

    Success4, Inc

    Founding CTO

    • Founding team member — all things engineering, in service of customer success

  4. 2016 — 2018

    Togg

    Founding Team — Head of Engineering

    • Built the engineering org from the founding team out

  5. 2013 — 2016

    Intel

    Backend Engineering Manager & Tech Lead

    • Led backend for Intel Education Study platform serving 100K+ students
    • Content catalog spanning 1M+ titles and 100M+ data points
    • Led an Intel Education Service Corps assignment to Rwanda — international team excellence award from the Rwanda Education Ministry

  6. 2009 — 2013

    Kno, Inc. (acquired by Intel)

    Senior Software Engineer & Software Lead

    • #2 non-founding employee — helped engineering grow to 80 and through acquisition by Intel
    • Embedded Linux, device drivers, kernel work on next-gen tablet hardware

  7. 2008 — 2009

    Juniper Networks

    DVT Engineer

    • Design verification and testing of switch control and interface boards

Anna University Chennai, B.E. ECE → Florida International University, M.S. EE

Angel Investing

Backing builders in infrastructure and AI.

Angel investing since 2019 — infrastructure, AI, and the occasional conviction bet on a founder. Member of The Chennai Angels since 2020, bridging the US and Indian startup ecosystems.

13+investments
2ecosystems (US · India)
3via The Chennai Angels

Side Projects

I build things because I can't help it.

Perspective

My take on the AI wave

Every platform shift rewards the people who ship through it, not the ones who spectate. I’ve watched this movie before — mobile, cloud — but this one is different in one specific way: the marginal cost of trying an idea has collapsed to nearly zero.

Three beliefs drive how I spend my time:

Agents are the new backend. The interesting systems being built right now are not chatbots — they’re pipelines of small, verifiable, autonomous steps with gates and audit trails. That’s how I build my trading systems, and it’s how we build compliance systems at Adalma.

Regulated industries are the real frontier. Anyone can demo AI. Making it stand up to an examiner — policy-gated, logged, tamper-evident — is where the durable value is. The institutions that need AI most are the ones that can afford it least, and closing that gap is a business, not charity.

Taste survives automation. When everyone can generate everything, the scarce skill is knowing what’s worth building and when to say no. Twenty years of shipping has taught me that judgment compounds faster than code.

Writing & Feeds

Thinking out loud.

Day-to-day: @nkrvivek on X

Beyond Work