From Solo Techie Entrepreneur to High Growth, Profitable Enterprise AI Success Story: Findability Sciences CEO Anand Mahurkar (Part 1)

I always love doing stories of my readers. Anand has been following the blog since 2010. He has built a terrific, fundamentals-focused AI company. And I am thrilled.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, and raised, and in what kind of background?

Anand Mahurkar: Thank you for having me here. I’ve been following you since 2010. I’ve been a long follower of your blog. I have a little bit of soft corner for your blog as you are of Indian origin and doing this fascinating work in entrepreneurship. My father was actually a commerce professor. He used to teach cost accounting. He used to create balance sheets and profit and loss for his students.

I used to sit next to him and he used my name, Anand and Co, as a fictitious example. I come from a very small village in interior Maharashtra. My mother was a language teacher. I never spoke English until I was 21. Then I stepped out of town and worked in manufacturing. I’m a mechanical engineer by education. I was working for a company in hardcore mechanical engineering, working in three shifts at 1,200 degrees Celsius. We were suppliers of General Motors and Ford.

When you do forging, you hammer it with a big force. The engineering process changed where you can now do screwing. If you screw the stuff, it requires less energy and the wastage is less. There is a German company called Weingarten. They produce the largest screw press where you put a hot metal and a big screw will come rotating. It will press it and it will form the shapes.

A robotic arm does the work. I used to sit with them late evenings learning computer science. These German engineers taught me basic software programming. I switched and got into software. I started this company with the idea that the ability to find information is a key ability that every organization needs. I trademarked findability and built a data platform.

Sramana Mitra: You’re now based in the US?

Anand Mahurkar: I’m in the Boston area. I’ve been here for the last 20 years. I moved from India to US as part of my job. My then employer acquired a company here in Massachusetts. I came here as a pre-sales technology engineer. I started supporting the sales team. I grew the business from $4 million to $40 million. I decided to step out of corporate. Today, we are a fairly-leading enterprise AI company in the world operating in three countries.

Sramana Mitra: Where in Boston are you based?

Anand Mahurkar: Our office is in downtown Boston, but I live and work out of my home north of Boston City on the border of New Hampshire. I’m 30 miles north of the MIT campus.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s come to Findability. Tell us what you do in the context of how you came up with the idea first.

Anand Mahurkar: I was working in content management and data management. Content management covered document management, workflow, and business process outsourcing type of processes. On the data side, I used to do data warehousing, data management, and data analytics. My company used to provide those solutions.

One of the largest banks here in the North East used us for deploying data warehousing. I was the head of the office in Massachusetts. The management team called me and said, “We’ve spent $7 million on this data warehousing. We’re not getting what we want.” It was unpleasant. I said, “Let me see what I can do.”

The idea dawned on me. This customer is not looking for data warehousing or a dashboard. This customer is looking for the ability to find information. Document management cannot solve it. We needed technology to find information. You need to have technology that connects internal, external, structured, and unstructured data. I was very excited. I quit my job and decided to build a technology. The idea came from a really unpleasant customer meeting.

This segment is part 1 in the series : From Solo Techie Entrepreneur to High Growth, Profitable Enterprise AI Success Story: Findability Sciences CEO Anand Mahurkar
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