Alok Kulkarni and the business of finding trouble early

The customer is an inconvenient person. They call at the wrong moment, choose an unexpected menu option and assume the expensive new system will work. Alok Kulkarni built a business around taking that person seriously before they ever picked up the phone. The beginnings were less grand: an engineer with a testing problem, two earlier ventures that had failed, and a partnership that was still willing to try again.

In 2006, while working as a solutions architect at Genesys, Kulkarni was involved in a speech-recognition system for a major Australian government agency. It needed to survive large numbers of callers. He could not find a reliable tool to reproduce those interactions at volume. An impressive system still needed an awkward examination. That gap became Cyara.

There is something pleasingly literal about the idea. Before inviting the public into a customer-service system, send in artificial customers. Let them call, navigate and encounter the machinery. Find the faults while the people affected are still software. Kulkarni, Luan Tran and Bonny Malik turned that premise into a company.

A degree, a pillow, a long wait

Kulkarni was born and mostly raised in Mumbai. He arrived in Melbourne at 17 with his mother and sister, joining his father, a chef. Their first home was a two-bedroom Glen Iris apartment furnished with help from The Smith Family. At Hawthorn Secondary College he finished dux, then entered Monash. He graduated in electrical and computer systems engineering in 1994.

His ambition had a physical address of its own: a slip of paper under his pillow, recording the goal of becoming a technology entrepreneur. He read it repeatedly. Paper is a modest piece of entrepreneurial equipment. It does, however, have the advantage of never requesting a software update.

In 1996 he met Tran at a Japanese software development company. Their early ventures failed, including an attempt at hotel-management software. Kulkarni gained business experience and an MBA; the partnership endured. His wife, Buena, encouraged him when committing to Cyara meant taking a risk with a family and a mortgage.

Years later, an early office above the Minar Indian restaurant supplied a less polished setting than the usual startup mythology. There was a broken window. The lesson he remembered was economical: keep expenditure manageable while leaving the ambition intact.

“You had to keep your costs low, you had to dream high”

Alok Kulkarni, recalling the early office

The customer who never loses patience

Cyara’s testing approach starts outside the organisation, where a customer actually stands. An internal component can pass its checks while the complete journey remains troublesome. Getting connected, receiving the right response and reaching the next stage are separate opportunities for something to go wrong. A customer experiences the sum of them.

Kulkarni has described a service spanning design, functional and integration testing, load testing and monitoring after release. That range matters because a customer-service system keeps changing. A new release can disturb an older route. A successful test yesterday cannot make an unconditional promise about tomorrow.

A useful way to picture the work is as a rehearsal with repeatable customers. The organisation can ask a similar question again after changing the system, then compare what happens. Synthetic interactions allow a team to examine the customer’s view without requiring actual customers to do the discovery work.

The patience of the artificial customer is part of the bargain. Software can repeat a journey without becoming offended by the hold music. People tend to have other plans. Kulkarni’s commercial insight gave businesses a way to examine the difference.

Profitability came before the cheque

Cyara’s first venture round arrived in March 2016, ten years after its founding. PeakSpan Capital and Greenspring Associates led the US$25 million Series A. By then the company had bootstrapped to profitability. Outside capital entered a business that had already found a way to pay its bills.

That sequence changes how the founding story reads. There was a decade between identifying the problem and raising that round. The investment was intended to expand the SaaS platform and grow teams in marketing, business development, sales and engineering. The work had become broad enough to require several kinds of expertise.

In January 2022, Cyara announced more than US$350 million from K1 Investment Management. Product development, digital channels, acquisitions and geographic expansion were the stated uses. By that announcement, more than 250 global brands used its platform. The original testing gap had acquired an international customer base.

A large funding number can steal the entire scene. Here, the earlier date deserves some attention too. The 2016 round marked an established, profitable operation opening its doors to venture investors. The 2022 investment gave that operation more choices about how to grow. Both describe changes in the founder’s job as much as changes in the bank balance.

Buying another piece of the puzzle

In April 2022, Cyara acquired Botium, adding chatbot and conversational-AI testing capabilities. It was a concrete use of the new capital. The customer might now type rather than call, but the underlying concern remained familiar: does the system behave as expected when someone actually uses it?

Botium brought technology, customers and a team in Austria. Automated testing was particularly relevant to conversations, where possible exchanges multiply quickly. A business cannot learn enough about a chatbot by asking it a handful of friendly questions and accepting its good manners as proof.

The next year brought Spearline, the Irish communications-testing company founded by Kevin Buckley. Its capabilities included placing calls within different countries and measuring connectivity and audio quality. A number that works from one location offers limited comfort to someone attempting it from another.

In explaining the acquisition, Kulkarni connected it to cloud communications and the additional complexity of video, AI and multiple channels. Moving equipment out of the building does not remove every problem. It changes what needs examination. His company was buying ways to inspect more of that changing environment.

A founder learns to share the controls

Kulkarni’s own professional history crosses research engineering, consulting, professional services, pre-sales, sales and leadership. He says that range helped him appreciate what different teams contribute. It also offers an explanation for a company whose work touches both technical infrastructure and the experience of an ordinary caller.

“I like building things, watching people grow and pushing the boundaries of possibilities.”

Alok Kulkarni

In discussing company growth, he has stressed hiring people with expertise beyond his own and building systems that help teams develop. The implication is practical: expertise has to travel beyond the founder. A larger company cannot route every important decision through a single desk.

He has also treated acquisitions as relationships requiring trust and attention to culture. Technology may provide the reason to meet. People still have to work together after the agreement is signed. A deal expands the organisation and introduces another set of histories, habits and expectations.

On October 31, 2024, Kulkarni moved to non-executive chairman after 18 years as CEO. Rishi Rana took over the executive role. Kulkarni described his continuing responsibilities in terms of strategic oversight, board alignment and stakeholder relationships. The founder remained involved, with a different set of controls in front of him.

Back on campus, with different questions

Kulkarni returned to Monash to deliver a graduation address in 2019. He paused several times to regain his composure. A university platform can look like a conventional career milestone from a distance. For someone who had crossed countries as a teenager to pursue an education, the return carried its own weight.

His connection to new founders now includes CDL-Melbourne, where his mentoring has focused on sales, marketing, commercialisation and routes to market. Those are useful subjects for technical teams. A promising invention still needs a customer, a price and a credible way to reach the people who might buy it.

He is also listed as a director of TiE Melbourne and the founder of TiE Angels. Together, those roles put him in conversations with entrepreneurs at earlier stages of the work he has spent years doing. The company-building experience becomes something another team can question, adapt or use.

That is a different kind of repetition from software testing, though the appeal is related. Experience becomes more useful when it can help someone recognise a problem sooner. An early founder need not reproduce every expensive lesson personally. There are plenty of fresh mistakes available without borrowing the whole catalogue.

The original question survives the new technology

In December 2025, Cyara appointed Sushil Kumar as CEO, succeeding Rana. Kulkarni, speaking as chairman, supported a further push into AI assurance. The company described a platform handling more than 350 million customer journeys annually and validating over a million AI-generated responses. These are company figures from that announcement, giving a dated view of its scale.

Conversational AI makes the test more complicated. A customer may arrive with an open question rather than follow a fixed menu. The answer needs examination, and so does the route through the interaction. The changing technology gives the original concern more places to appear.

Kulkarni’s story follows that concern across changing jobs: engineering, founding, building teams, acquiring capabilities and chairing the board. The ambition under the pillow eventually met a very specific piece of friction at work. He and his partners stayed with it long enough to build a business. For the customer at the other end of the line, the desired result remains pleasantly ordinary. The call connects. The answer makes sense. The next step works.