Forty students are a useful place to begin a story about a technology founder. They give the ambition a headcount. In April 2026, P99soft announced expanded office space and a training initiative in Loni, Maharashtra, with 40 students onboarded after a campus drive. The program put practical projects, industry workflows and exposure to artificial intelligence within reach of a new group of learners. For its founder, Ashutosh Pulate, the location carried a particular resonance: he had started his own education in a Marathi-medium school in rural Maharashtra.
His career has since taken him through enterprise software, technical leadership at Electronic Arts and the founding of P99soft in 2021. There are international conferences in the picture, a US business presence and a freight software launch. Yet Loni supplies the detail that makes the rest more interesting. Pulate has made creating career opportunities in smaller towns part of his company’s stated mission. Here was one place where that intention acquired desks, projects and participants.
A founder’s biography usually travels in one direction: away from the beginning, toward somewhere with a larger airport. Pulate’s has an additional route. While building a business that works across borders, he has also been bringing parts of that business closer to the kind of place where he began.
The long apprenticeship before the founder’s title
Pulate studied computer science at Savitribai Phule Pune University from 2000 to 2004, completing a Bachelor of Engineering. Later, from 2010 to 2012, he pursued a postgraduate diploma in business administration, focused on marketing, through Symbiosis Centre for Distance Learning. The pairing is an instructive one: an education in how systems work, followed by study of how businesses reach people.
His working life included software engineering at Aurionpro, an associate systems role at Tata Consultancy Services, and programming and project leadership at Syntel. At Mindtree he worked as a technical lead and a technical architect or manager, including work on Electronic Arts projects. Java, Salesforce and AWS appeared among the technologies in that professional record. The progression ran through implementation, architecture and responsibility for teams.
His professional qualifications also include Salesforce developer and administrator certifications, Oracle Certified Web Component Developer and Sun Certified Java Programmer. They add detail to the architecture roles: specific platforms and programming skills sit behind the management titles. Alongside his later marketing studies, they show the different kinds of preparation in his record, from writing software to understanding a business audience. The company he founded would eventually need both kinds of conversation.
At Electronic Arts, Pulate’s roles included senior architect, senior engineering manager and technical director. He held the director position from July 2020 to August 2021. The name on the employer’s door belonged to the games business; his work included enterprise systems and technical leadership. That distinction helps explain the breadth of the company he later established, where product engineering sits alongside cloud, data and business software.
There is something pleasingly uncinematic about this stretch of the story. Years of technical work precede the founder’s title. Job descriptions accumulate. Responsibility expands. The experience gives Pulate’s later emphasis on usable technology a practical setting: before selling the promise of software, he spent years working on the machinery.
A company with more than one kind of work
P99soft began in 2021. Pulate’s explanation of its purpose emphasizes turning ideas into useful digital products and building long-term value. The company’s work spans software development, IT consulting, cloud services, AI and enterprise support. It is a broad brief, with a recurring practical question underneath it: what does the customer need the technology to accomplish?
His earlier employers help make that range legible. Architecture and enterprise systems demand attention to the connections between applications, data and the people who use them. P99soft’s current services bring those concerns together in a business that also undertakes product engineering and game development. The work can involve building something new or helping an existing operation function more coherently.
By July 2025, P99soft described a team of more than 170 professionals across India and the United States. That figure belongs to a particular point in its growth, rather than serving as a permanent counter on the wall. It does establish that the venture had moved beyond its initial small team. Managing such a business requires other people to carry decisions, expertise and relationships.
“I am deeply committed to empowering our team with clarity, support and the freedom to innovate.”
Ashutosh Pulate
The useful word in that statement is “clarity.” Freedom sounds attractive in a founder’s message; a team still needs to know what it is trying to deliver. Pulate places support beside independence. The combination offers a straightforward description of the working environment he says he wants to create.
The export business gets its own software
On March 7, 2025, P99soft launched Freightnaut at its Loni office. The product was designed to simplify export operations, including documentation and quotations, for exporters and freight forwarders. It gave the company’s product-building work a specific commercial setting: the administrative tasks that sit behind moving goods across borders.
Prospective customers attended the launch and tried the product firsthand. Their presence matters more than the ceremonial photograph might suggest. It placed the people expected to use the software in the room with the people building it. The event included interaction and feedback, giving the launch a practical purpose alongside the occasion itself.
Export documentation is unlikely to win a contest for glamorous software categories. It is, however, work that someone has to do. Freightnaut’s focus on documents and quotations makes Pulate’s language about simplifying complexity easier to grasp. The promise has a recognizable object: an export operation with fewer administrative complications.
The Loni setting also joins two parts of his story that might otherwise remain separate. A company seeking customers in global trade introduced its product from a smaller Indian town. Later, that same town would feature in its training plans. International business and local opportunity appear in the same operating geography.
From Las Vegas to Bengaluru, with a notebook’s worth of questions
Pulate’s calendar has included the places where technology companies gather to discuss what comes next. He represented P99soft at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas in late 2023. The conference covered cloud infrastructure, machine learning, generative AI and data integration, all relevant to the company’s services. Attendance put him among the developers, vendors and business teams working through those subjects.
In February 2024, he and Mayur Sonawane, P99soft’s head of technology, attended UiPath DevCon in Bengaluru. The subjects there included automation development and AI-powered tools. In October 2025, Pulate represented the company at GITEX Global in Dubai, looking at emerging technologies, potential partnerships and product opportunities for its subsequent roadmap.
The travel follows the range of his business: cloud, automation, enterprise technology. It also shows him working alongside other leaders rather than appearing only as a solitary founder. Sonawane joined him at the automation conference; David Torres joined him at Dreamforce in 2026. Those relationships put technical and commercial expertise beside the founder’s role.
By that Dreamforce update, the discussion had become especially concrete. P99soft emphasized moving AI into enterprise workflows, preparing data, and handling governance and trust. For a former architect now running a services business, these are familiar kinds of implementation questions dressed in newer technology. Customers still need systems that fit their operations, people who can maintain them and an intelligible result.
The distance that forty students can shorten
Pulate’s rural background is part of how he explains P99soft’s direction. He has linked the business to creating opportunities for talented people in Tier 3 and Tier 4 towns. That ambition shifts attention from the founder’s own departure to the opportunities available to people coming after him.
The April 2026 initiative at Pravara Rural Education Society’s College of Food Technology in Loni gave that ambition a defined program. Alongside the expanded office space, it offered structured training, project work and exposure to industry technologies. The 40 students came through a campus recruitment drive. The program’s stated purpose was to connect academic learning with the requirements of actual work.
students onboarded for a practical training initiative
The details deserve careful attention. Project-based learning gives participants something to attempt, revise and discuss. Exposure to workflows introduces the coordination that sits around the code. AI was included among the emerging technologies students would encounter. Together, these elements describe a route into practice, with the company taking a role in that transition.
In July 2025, Pulate received the Visionary CEO of the Year award in AI, Technology and Innovation at ET Excellence Telangana. Recognition supplies a date for the scrapbook. The training program supplies another kind of milestone: a group of people beginning work on skills that may shape their own careers.
There is a smaller, more personal entry in the company’s January 2026 calendar. Pulate visited Gangadhar Baba Chhatralay, an orphanage, and spent time with the children there. The visit belongs alongside the training initiative without being confused with it: one was a community visit, the other a structured program for practical learning. Both place him in settings beyond customer meetings and technology conferences. They also add ordinary human encounters to a biography otherwise measured in job titles, products and business milestones.
Pulate’s story now stretches from a rural classroom through established technology employers to a company serving customers across countries. The part that gives it a continuing tension is his attempt to connect that outward expansion with opportunity nearer the beginning. In Loni, the idea has become specific enough to count. Forty students, practical projects, a place to start. For a founder accustomed to discussing what technology can build, that is a useful thing to be building.