Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Prashant Kumar, CTO of Cardinality (Part 1)

This is a deeply technical discussion about a specific layer of the technology stack where Data Engineering and other data related disciplines are handled.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Cardinality. 

Prashant Kumar: I’m one of the co-founders of Cardinality. My undergraduation degree is in Computer Science and Masters is in Social Science. I’ve been doing Cardinality for the last five years. Before that, I spent time in Telcos creating advanced and scalable products. I was part of launching 2G, 3G, and 4G. I was also part of the iPhone launches within the operator environment.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you doing Cardinality out of?

Prashant Kumar: We’re based out of London. That’s where we started. We’ve got four offices in Poland, US, India, and Philippines. 

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Cardinality. What is the premise? What customer problem are you solving? It sounds like your background in the cusp of computer science and social science has influenced some of your work. Tell us how.

Prashant Kumar: The technology side always helped me understand and deliver products. The social science helped me understand the usability and business side. Just taking a step back and how we started. Me and one or two other colleagues were working in one of the Telcos in the UK back in 2012 when London Olympics was supposed to happen.

We thought, “How can we save data coming through the network during Olympics?” At that time, the primary storage or the database stack was data warehouses, which was very expensive and not that scalable. We ended up using some big data tech namely Hadoop and all that. It was quite new at that time. We got in quite early. That’s where the roots come from.

As I left the organization, we thought of some of the interesting things we’ve done in the organization. Back in 2015, we started Cardinality. As it happened, my ex-employer became our first customer. That’s how we got the break with Telefonica as our first customer. As an organization, we solve multiple problems. We’ve been doing this for the last few years. Our primary focus has been to deliver end-customer value.

As we progress in this discussion, we can probably touch upon the gaps in the market in the analytics space. As we started in London, we founded a lot of tech being developed in the Silicon Valley. There were a lot of gaps. These products came out from amazing hyperscale organizations, but there was a massive gap from an end customer perspective. We started focusing on the use cases and started developing our product around that.

We’ve been quite successful in the telecommunications domain. We have customers like Vodafone across Europe, Telefonica, customers in the Middle East and the Far East. We’ve been delivering value to the customers by letting them have access to data at scale. When I say data at scale, I’m talking about 40 to 50 billion events in a day. 

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Prashant Kumar, CTO of Cardinality
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