Balaji Sreenivasan and the decisions before the bridge

At eight, Balaji Sreenivasan had a computer and a customer. The computer was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. The customer was his sister, whose comic-book collection needed a catalog. He wrote one in BASIC. She liked it. Before there was a company, there was the pleasing discovery that somebody else's small inconvenience could become a reason to write software.

Decades later, the collections have become considerably harder to organize. There are roads to repair, bridges to fund, construction contracts to administer, and competing projects asking for the same money. Sreenivasan, the founder and CEO of Aurigo Software Technologies, has spent much of his career working on the decisions that precede the things we can actually see.

A bridge makes a better photograph than a capital plan. The capital plan, however, has a rather strong claim to having come first.

The boss offered two options

Sreenivasan grew up in Bangalore, now commonly called Bengaluru, with a senior bureaucrat for a father and a school principal for a mother. Education carried some authority in that household. He studied mechanical engineering at the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, then earned a mechanical engineering master's degree at the University of Florida in 1999.

Early in his working life, he was a design engineer with an engineering consulting company. He noticed processes he thought could be improved by putting them into software. He arranged a meeting with his boss and proposed doing just that.

The response was admirably economical: concentrate on the job, or leave and pursue his own ideas. Sreenivasan chose the second option. He has described that decision as the best he ever made. His account has the satisfaction of a resignation story told by someone whose subsequent venture survived long enough to make the punchline work.

Aurigo began in 2003. Its first address, by his recollection, was his parents' 300-square-foot garage. The distance between that room and the infrastructure budgets the company would eventually help manage is the sort of distance that a floor plan cannot adequately express.

A clipboard was an opening

The opportunity took shape through practical work. Sreenivasan and Deepak Pulipati developed a mobile middleware platform, allowing people and applications to reach a central server remotely. A customer called Xpio wanted construction automation software built on it. The two subsequently bought Xpio, turning toward an industry whose work was often conducted far from a desk.

That detail mattered. Information gathered at a construction site had to get back to the people responsible for purchasing, payment, and oversight. Handwritten records introduced delays and ambiguity. Software could shorten the trip between an observation in the field and a decision at headquarters.

By 2010, Aurigo had developed tools spanning estimates, bidding, contracts, assets, and inspections. Oregon's transportation department was among its customers. The business was already reaching beyond the narrow problem with which Sreenivasan had started.

His ambition then was expansive: he wanted to offer the infrastructure industry a broader combination of software and services. The useful discovery underneath it was specific. A construction site produces information as well as concrete. Somebody has to make that information travel.

The trade-show booth they didn't have

In his recollections of Aurigo's early years, there is a less photogenic companion to the garage: the trade show without a booth. He and Kevin Koenig, then the company's chief technology officer, would arrive and let the product do the talking. Today the company sponsors industry events and holds its own summits. Back then, having something useful to demonstrate had to cover a good deal of the marketing budget.

Ravi Gulati became an early investor in 2005. Sreenivasan remembers approaching him about raising two million dollars and receiving advice about raising more while spending less. The lesson stayed with him as the company grew.

By 2013, Aurigo had outgrown Long Island. Denver, the Bay Area, Raleigh, and Austin were considered. Austin offered a business ecosystem and access to talent, but the decision also had a domestic ingredient: Sreenivasan and his wife already had close friends there. A company relocation can contain a spreadsheet and a social life.

His stated operating rule remained simple: receipts needed to exceed spending. Even a business concerned with enormous public budgets had to keep an eye on its own.

Learning the owner's side of the table

Sreenivasan briefly pursued the Indian market before concentrating on the larger opportunity he saw in North America. By 2017, government ministries and city councils were central to the story. His advice to entrepreneurs that year emphasized solving a substantial problem and accepting the less glamorous demands of building a business.

There is a certain fitness in the market he chose. Selling to an infrastructure owner requires an appreciation of work that takes time. The people buying the software are responsible for assets expected to outlast a product release, a budget cycle, and quite possibly the people who approved them.

He has described public owners as customers with extensive controls, a need for transparency, and purchasing cycles that can be long. They must account for how public money is used. That makes the ability to trace a decision part of the product's usefulness, alongside the ability to make it.

By his 2022 account, his own workday often began at five in the morning. His attention went to senior colleagues, products, new markets, partnerships, and employee development. The engineer who once proposed changing his employer's processes now had an organization of his own to coordinate.

AutoCAD came around again

In 2020, Autodesk agreed to take a minority stake in Aurigo. The rationale was a connection between complementary kinds of work: Autodesk's design tools and Aurigo's software for owners planning, procuring, building, and operating infrastructure.

For Sreenivasan, there was a personal pleasure in the arrangement. He had learned AutoCAD as a mechanical engineer. Working with the company behind it gave the partnership the feeling of returning to an earlier chapter, with a different job title.

The practical question was how information could cross the boundary between an owner and a contractor without being entered all over again. Aurigo's integration with PlanGrid was an early example. Partnerships, in this line of work, have to be visible in what happens to the data.

“Infrastructure starts in the CFO’s office.”

Balaji Sreenivasan, July 2026

Bengaluru kept the workshop

The move to Austin did not move the engineering story out of India. In February 2025, Aurigo had about 600 employees globally, with close to 500 in India. Sreenivasan said the actual product development happened there, while about 90 percent of the business came from the United States and Canada.

He was also looking toward the Middle East and considering acquisitions that might add geographic reach or particular technical capabilities. The company had become a business in which the location of the customers and the location of the workshop were deliberately different.

His explanation of hiring is revealing. Aurigo needs people who understand infrastructure alongside people who understand software and AI. In his view, an engineer's familiarity with the industry matters because a technically accomplished product still has to answer somebody's working problem.

The Bengaluru team contributed to Lumina, Aurigo's AI offering, and to Engage, which collects and analyzes community feedback. That last product widens the cast: the people affected by a proposed project also have information that its owners need to hear.

The decision before the digger

In July 2025, Aurigo launched Primus for private facility owners. The product brought capital planning into settings including manufacturing, retail, and data-center development. It offered tools to compare scenarios, score projects, model cash flows, and connect plans with construction data.

The launch extended a recurring interest in Sreenivasan's work: deciding which project deserves to happen. Keeping a construction project organized is one challenge. Choosing it over several other plausible uses of the money is another, earlier challenge.

By July 2026, Aurigo's customers included 14 state transportation departments as well as federal agencies and city public works departments. Sreenivasan put his view succinctly: “Infrastructure starts in the CFO's office.” The remark brings an entire industry back to a room where choices are still being made.

In September 2026, his attention turned to the time those choices consume. Writing about AI infrastructure, he argued that capital owners should measure the interval between identifying a viable opportunity and approving its funding. Power availability, prices, and sites can change while committees are still considering a project.

His proposed remedies were operational: keep a shared record, update business cases when assumptions change, and compare the speed of internal approval with the speed of the surrounding market. A faster construction schedule cannot retrieve an opportunity that disappeared before the money was approved.

An architect, with a tidying habit

Asked what he might do if he were not running Aurigo, Sreenivasan chose architecture. He likes designing. Asked how he unwinds, he described cleaning and decluttering. He admires Satya Nadella's empathetic leadership, values hiring people with greater expertise than his own, and favors early starts supported by coffee.

These details make a useful final picture. He enjoys imagining buildings, has made a career helping owners organize their construction, and spends some of his free time putting things in order. The habit appears at several scales.

There is no need to turn the sister's comic books into a prophecy. They were comic books. Yet the satisfaction he describes in that first program remains recognizable: understand what somebody is trying to do, arrange the information, and make the next step easier. The infrastructure got bigger. The customer still needs the catalog to work.