An Amazon Echo Dot sits on the bonnet of a silver car. Atul Jalan stands beside it, one hand in his pocket, the other raised mid-explanation. Around him is a Bengaluru street: trees, parked vehicles, fallen leaves. The little black cylinder looks faintly underdressed for its appointment with enterprise software. In 2017, this was a way to show something Jalan had been working towards for years: a business system you could simply ask a question.
Inside Manthan, his retail analytics company, the demonstration was more specific. An executive could ask about falling sales or a newly launched brand. Alexa supplied the voice; Manthan’s Maya worked through the business information. The ambition was to shorten the journey between wondering what had happened and knowing enough to do something about it. A retailer had a question. The computer ought to understand.
That wish connects several apparently different Jalan occupations: software founder, science storyteller, author, enthusiastic reader of the future. He is interested in what machines can do, certainly. But he keeps returning to the person at the other end of the transaction. How does a manager ask? How does a customer choose? How does an ordinary reader make sense of a technology that is already rearranging ordinary life?
A career without a first boss
Jalan’s independence came before the retail algorithms. In 1991, he started MicroTrack, which made security software. By 1994, its business had become substantial enough that he left his computer science course at the University of Calcutta. He had once imagined becoming a journalist. Instead, he entered working life through a company of his own.
“My fierce sense of independence got me into entrepreneurship.”
Atul Jalan · 2016
His intellectual companions included Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. It is an unusual reading list for a startup origin story, although the wish to choose one’s own mistakes travels easily from existentialism to a software office.
MicroTrack was followed by Cybertrek Technologies, established in 1995, working in intranets, extranets and digital communications. Then came Netkraft, offering software development and related services to businesses internationally. Adea Solutions acquired Netkraft in 2004. Jalan had learned the business of making software for other businesses before making analytics his long-running subject.
Experience, in his telling, has a complication: yesterday’s success can make an entrepreneur too comfortable. A new venture brings assumptions and problems that will not politely reproduce those of the old one. He has argued for carrying useful learning forward while staying adaptable. The record of repeated companies makes that observation less tidy, and more interesting, than the familiar injunction to believe in yourself.
Before the algorithm, a folder
In London in 2003, between ventures, Jalan was considering what to do next. His possible directions included robotics and a ski resort. He opened a computer folder called Manthan to collect ideas. The name carried the sense of churning or deep reflection. Eventually, the thought that held his attention was data: businesses were recording more of their activity, and those records could become the raw material for better decisions.
He returned to Bengaluru to develop the idea. An early encounter with McDonald’s executives on a flight led to a meeting in Chicago and a customer relationship. Later, a conversation with Future Group’s Kishore Biyani connected the same proposition to Indian stores: put useful intelligence within reach of the manager responsible for a particular shop. Behind the mathematics was a fairly human sales skill - explaining why this mattered to the person listening.
By August 2005, Manthan was introducing AstrA and ARC to retail and consumer goods businesses. One helped connect strategy to operating performance; the other handled everyday reporting and analysis. Its target markets already extended beyond India. The company was building products for retailers abroad while working from Bengaluru, making the international customer part of the proposition early.
The vocabulary was less fashionable than today’s AI language, but the practical question was recognisable. Could software help someone running a shop see what was working? A transaction system could record a sale. A useful analytical product had to help a manager understand what that sale meant alongside all the other sales.
The awkward distance between a report and an answer
There was investment behind that work. In February 2012, Manthan announced $15 million from Norwest Venture Partners, following earlier funding from Fidelity, IDG Ventures and others. At the time, its solutions had been deployed with 70 retail customers. The list included McDonald’s, Crocs and Woolworth. Jalan spoke of using the money for products, acquisitions and expansion.
Those details give the story some necessary weight. Enterprise software is built amid budgets, integrations and customer commitments. The founder who likes large questions also has to deliver something a buyer can install and use. A clever demonstration gets attention; a working product has to survive the following Monday.
Maya pushed that problem into the interface. Launched in 2017, it combined natural language processing and machine learning with Manthan’s analytics. It could interpret business questions in context, with answers shaped by a user’s role. Connecting it to Alexa made a complicated information system approachable through speech. The intended user no longer needed to navigate a sequence of screens just to begin asking.
That is a revealing product choice for Jalan. He wanted sophisticated analysis to become easier to reach. The interface mattered because it determined who could participate. A business could possess plenty of data and still make asking a simple question an administrative adventure. Maya was an attempt to remove some of the ceremony.
Then he gave the reader a turn
In April 2019, Penguin published Where Will Man Take Us?, Jalan’s book about technology and the people making and using it. Its subjects include artificial intelligence, quantum computing, morality and the changing terms of human relationships. A retail dashboard is a narrow window onto human behaviour. A book gave him room to open several more.
The title places responsibility with people. Machines enter a world that humans have imagined, financed, designed and chosen to inhabit. Jalan’s interest is in the consequences of that process. The person building the tool is also being changed by its use. That makes technology a subject for the general reader, rather than a private conversation among its makers.
His own childhood reading included Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. He describes the pleasure of belonging to a generation that read those imagined futures and then watched parts of them become possible. There is an identifiable continuity between the science fiction reader and the founder trying to make a talking business system work. Both want to see what happens when an improbable idea acquires a mechanism.
Writing the book brought a more prosaic difficulty. He tried fixed writing hours and word targets, then found himself writing when the inclination arrived. New material kept appearing as the world supplied fresh examples. Eventually, he imposed a deadline for additions. Even a book about accelerating change has to stop changing long enough to reach the printer.
By October 2019, the book had been recognised as a national bestseller by Penguin Random House India. Jalan also started Tomorrow Dialogues, a forum for discussing the future. The public conversation was part of his purpose: make emerging science understandable enough that people outside specialist circles could form a view about it.
Room for a bicycle, and Douglas Adams
The rest of his public writing suggests a reader with several tabs open. His website includes travelogues, film essays and book reviews. There is a piece on the Adalaj stepwell, a review of My Octopus Teacher, and a place for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The shelf is allowed to wander beyond business.
His publisher’s biography supplies an especially pleasing detail: he likes travelling on a bicycle he built himself, using technology he is trying out. The 2015 Analytics India Magazine profile adds poetry, music and astronomy to his interests. These are small particulars, but they keep the figure behind the software from disappearing into a corporate job title.
One name changes, the question persists
In January 2021, Manthan and RichRelevance completed their merger under a new name, Algonomy. Jalan became CEO, with RichRelevance’s Sarath Jarugula taking the chief product officer role. The combination brought retail analytics together with personalisation technology, linking knowledge about a customer to the experience the customer received.
There was another expansion in view in January 2022, when Algonomy announced its intention to acquire the business of Sri Lanka’s Linear Squared. Demand planning and forecasting would complement its retail and supply chain software. Jalan also emphasised the engineering talent in Colombo. His public post even left space for cricket once the formalities were settled.
On July 30, 2026, ADA announced that it had completed its acquisition of Algonomy. The combined business operates under the ADA brand worldwide. The announcement described Algonomy as serving more than 400 brands and framed the next stage around AI systems taking actions across customer experiences. Jalan described the opportunity as arriving when “decisioning stops advising and starts acting.”
That is a considerable distance from a computer folder in London. Yet the question beside the Echo Dot still fits. Someone wants to understand a business, a customer, a choice. Jalan has spent years trying to make the machinery answer usefully. His book asks people to think about what follows. And the bicycle suggests that, given a promising enough piece of technology, he may prefer to assemble it and take it outside.