The most expensive sentence in enterprise software is often delivered in a calm voice: “We think that is how it works.” It arrives midway through a modernization project, after the diagrams have been admired and the budget has acquired commas. A pricing exception lives in an old application. An approval rule is tucked inside a SaaS setting. A retired employee remains, spiritually at least, the only reliable manual. Everybody owns a fragment. Nobody owns the truth.
Adam Branch has spent roughly two decades in rooms where this sentence has consequences. His career runs through federal systems, Fortune 500 transformation programs, low-code platforms, cloud migrations, and the peculiar corporate habit of preserving a critical rule everywhere except where somebody can find it. The experience gave him a useful suspicion: code is rarely the whole obstacle. The deeper trouble is the accumulation of decisions embedded in code, configuration, process, and memory.
Branch now calls that accumulation “decision debt.” It is technical debt's more political cousin. Old code can be ugly yet precise. A business rule can be perfectly clear to three departments and still mean three different things. Modernizing the software without resolving the rule merely gives the disagreement a fresher interface.
First company, first lesson
Branch did not arrive at this idea by watching the AI boom from a pleasant distance. He learned it while building Incentive Technology Group, the enterprise and federal technology firm he co-founded with Michelle Samad. The two were Georgetown graduates. By 2019, ITG had reached about $100 million in revenue, employed roughly 500 people, and earned Branch and Samad a place on Washingtonian's Tech Titans list.
The company was a creature of serious systems. Its teams worked on cloud platforms and modernization for U.S. government agencies, environments where an undocumented exception is not charming folklore. It is operational risk. ITG became a major public-sector partner for ServiceNow and Appian, and its growth was brisk enough that Virginia offered incentives to keep a planned expansion in Crystal City when the company considered Georgia.
In January 2020, ICF agreed to acquire ITG for $255 million. The announcement put ITG's 2019 revenue near $90 million, its year-end run rate above $100 million, and its headcount above 350. Branch and Samad were named as the equity holders in the purchase agreement. A company assembled around the difficult work of making institutions more modern had itself reached the neatest milestone in a founder's biography: a large, legible exit.
Yet exits do not obligingly resolve the problem that produced the company. They often clarify which part remains unsolved. Branch's official biography says he has built two enterprise technology businesses past $100 million in revenue. The second would be built around the stubborn residue of the first: before you replace a system, can you explain the decisions it makes?
The invisible inventory
Rhino.ai, founded in 2023, begins with an unfashionable act: looking carefully. The company extracts business logic from legacy code, packaged software, SaaS configurations, workflows, and documents. It organizes what it finds into Universal Application Notation, a platform-independent graph intended to preserve the logic and its lineage. Then that governed record can inform a migration, documentation, testing, or an AI agent.
The distinction matters because Rhino is not pitching itself as a code generator. Code generators make new things. Branch is preoccupied with understanding the old things that still run payroll, price policies, route applications, approve transactions, and keep institutions upright. The old system may be clumsy. It is also an inventory of decisions made under conditions the replacement team did not witness.
Is Rhino.ai the GitHub for business logic?Adam Branch
Branch has used that comparison publicly, and it is helpful precisely because it has limits. GitHub gives code a home, history, ownership, and a visible record of change. Business rules rarely enjoy the same tidiness. They drift between a requirements document, an application's settings, a developer's implementation, and the workaround an operations team invented on a Tuesday. Rhino's proposition is to give those rules a canonical place without pretending they were canonical to begin with.
There is a warning folded into Branch's pitch. He remembers the robotic process automation era as hundreds of bots performing hundreds of tasks with too little traceability. AI agents could repeat the error at higher speed. Two systems may both be intelligent and still disagree about the policy they are meant to follow. Branch's phrase for the remedy is compact: “Build one source of truth first. Reuse it everywhere.”
A second act with institutional partners
Branch's education supplies two tidy bookends: an undergraduate degree from Georgetown and an MBA from Harvard Business School. His operating education is messier and perhaps more useful. Federal modernization taught him that change must survive review. Selling into large organizations taught him that a technically elegant product still needs distribution, trust, procurement, and partners who can carry it into consequential work.
Rhino's growth reflects that lesson. KPMG formed an alliance with the company, then made a strategic minority investment in 2024. The relationship gave Rhino access to large transformation programs and gave KPMG a software layer for application discovery and modernization. In January 2025, Rhino raised a $50 million Series A led by Koch Disruptive Technologies. The round was unusually large for an early institutional raise, but the company was not proposing a weekend utility. It was trying to enter the oldest, most protected rooms in enterprise computing.
Branch also pointed outward. He described Portugal as a base for Rhino's expansion, citing its technical talent, infrastructure, and growing startup ecosystem. By 2026, the KPMG collaboration had produced a government modernization offering with Awardable status on the Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace. Rhino also announced a Carahsoft partnership designed to make the platform easier for public agencies to procure.
ITG reaches roughly $100 million in revenue and Branch is named a Washingtonian Tech Titan with Michelle Samad.
ICF acquires ITG for $255 million.
Branch founds Rhino.ai in the Washington, D.C. area.
KPMG deepens its alliance and takes a strategic minority stake.
Rhino.ai raises a $50 million Series A led by Koch Disruptive Technologies.
Government distribution expands through Tradewinds and Carahsoft.
Discipline under velocity
Branch's public writing favors direct sentences and the occasional exclamation point. Still, the product thesis is fundamentally cautious. It asks an enterprise to slow down long enough to establish what is true before automating what happens next. In an AI market that rewards demonstrations of instant creation, Branch keeps returning to provenance, confidence scores, version histories, and approval gates.
This is less glamorous than asking a model to build an application from a sentence. It is also closer to how durable institutions behave. A bank cannot shrug at a calculation's origin. A government team cannot treat a permissions rule as creative writing. An AI agent operating inside either organization needs more than fluent output. It needs a traceable relationship with the rules it applies.
Branch's career connection to co-founder Michelle Samad matters here, as do Rhino's current leaders and partners. Company building at this scale is a network exercise. Rhino's technology leadership, operating team, enterprise partners, and systems integrators turn the founder's thesis into deployments. Branch sets the vision, but the vision itself argues against solitary knowledge. If one person's memory is the system, the system is already in trouble.
Look for knowledge your customer cannot afford to lose, then make it portable, legible, and owned.
The wager beneath the software
Rhino's largest claim is not that old software can be read faster. It is that an enterprise's logic deserves independence from whatever application happens to contain it today. Platforms age. Vendors change. Teams reorganize. The rule that determines whether a transaction clears or a case moves forward may need to outlive all of them.
That aspiration turns Branch's second act into a story about memory. ITG helped organizations move onto modern platforms. Rhino wants to preserve the institutional meaning that must survive the move. One company handled transformation as a service. The next tries to turn part of that hard-won method into infrastructure.
The sequence also offers a founder's lesson. Branch did not abandon his old domain in search of novelty. He narrowed the domain until he found a problem that could become a product. Years of services work revealed which conversations repeated, which documents were always missing, and which risks survived every platform change. Rhino packages that repetition. The result is not a rejection of consulting experience but a compression of it: hundreds of programs distilled into the belief that understanding must come before generation. A first company can teach a founder how to deliver the work. A second can ask which part of the work should no longer depend on heroic effort.
There is plenty left for Rhino to prove. Enterprise estates are idiosyncratic, politics can defeat clean ontologies, and a graph is only as useful as the confidence people place in it. Branch's response is not a promise that complexity disappears. It is a demand that complexity become visible.
The bet has a pleasing modesty at its center. Before the agent acts, before the new application ships, before the executive announces the transformation, somebody has to ask how the place really works. Adam Branch has built his second company around staying for the answer.