Building a New Age AI Services Company: Cognida CEO Feroze Mohammed (Part 1)

IT Services is going through a profound shift. Huge opportunity for more companies like Palantir to be built. This discussion parses the nuances of building such ventures. Needless to say, VC money is now going to flood into this model.

Sramana Mitra: All right, let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. I’d like to get some context about your entrepreneurial journey and where you come from, where were you born, raised, and what kind of background.

Feroze Mohammed: Great, thank you so much for having me over. I’ve watched quite a few of your sessions and found them pretty interesting. I love how you democratize the entire knowledge. So really, I’ve enjoyed those sessions.

So thank you for having me on. I essentially grew up in a small town in Odisha in India, in the eastern part of the country. I then moved to Hyderabad to do my master’s. Next, I joined a company called CMC R&D, working on product development and building products. This was almost 30 years back. I worked for a few years for CMC building products.

I then went on to join Sierra Atlantic, which was a startup then. That’s where I met Raju. I was among the first few members in Sierra Atlantic and was part of the leadership team. We grew that to about 2500 people globally. It was about two decades of excellent work – a combination of products plus services. It was a highly differentiated services model. Then, we got a good exit into Hitachi Consulting.

I then moved on to essay a few roles in Hitachi Consulting – initially running the global delivery network for Hitachi Consulting and then went on to run the Asia-Pacific markets and eventually the global markets for Hitachi Consulting as the CEO of Hitachi Consulting.

Then we merged Hitachi Consulting into Hitachi Vantara and put all the digital assets in a separate entity called Hitachi Digital Solutions. I was the CEO of Hitachi Digital Solutions. That’s when this idea of starting this venture Cognida.ai came about. I think the pandemic was a time to introspect and reflect.

Sramana Mitra: When did you start Cognida?

Feroze Mohammed: We started about three years back.

Sramana Mitra: So that’s 2022.

Feroze Mohammed: Yes, it was at the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022. I think we landed our first client at the beginning of 2022.

Sramana Mitra: What was the thesis? What were you going to do with Cognida?  

Feroze Mohammed: During the pandemic, there was a lot of introspection and reflection. We thought we should start something of our own. At that point of time, we’re looking at where to play. We wanted to play in a space where we can add the maximum value to our clients.

We had seen in our journey with Hitachi and before that with Sierra Atlantic that the biggest value that clients derive in these digital transformation exercises was essentially from the insights from the data. That was helping clients to completely transform their businesses sometimes or at the least build a competitive advantage in their industry.

So, we wanted to focus on the insights from data, but that field was fairly crowded. There were a lot of companies that were providing services around insights from data.

But the more closely we looked at it, we realized that most of the companies were still focused on the rear-view mirror. They were looking at descriptive analytics. While there is much talk about looking into the future with predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics, not many companies were doing that.

We realized that predictive and prescriptive insights from data would be relevant for the enterprises for the next decade or so. If enterprises were to drive real competitive advantage, that would come from looking forward.

So, we doubled down on that space where we didn’t have a lot of players playing. With the advent of AI, the true ability to build predictive insights was possible at scale. So, we wanted to kind of double down on that space. That’s how our journey began.

Cognida.ai stands for Cognitive Insights from Data using AI. That was a highly focused space that we wanted to play in.

Sramana Mitra: Was there a particular vertical where you wanted to do this?

Feroze Mohammed: Initially, we were agnostic. We were looking at use cases across industries and trying to essentially solve the problem of getting predictive insights from data. Over the past three years, we’ve gained specific traction in three industries – manufacturing, healthcare and life sciences, and financial services, specifically in the asset management side of financial services. Of course, we also do a lot of work for technology companies.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Building a New Age AI Services Company: Cognida CEO Feroze Mohammed
1 2 3 4 5 6 7