A honeymoon is an unusual place to conduct a business review. In 2013, Anshul Jain visited Switzerland and met his business school friend Balesh Lakshminarayanan, then working in Geneva. In a Lucerne hotel, a laptop opened, numbers appeared, and a holiday acquired consequences. Romance had, rather inconveniently, made room for a spreadsheet.
The two friends would spend years building ABSYZ together. Balesh became its founding chief technology officer and later its chief executive. At the end of 2025, he left. By January 2026, he was leading Abilytics, a company working on enterprise AI. Along the way, he also found time to write fiction. His book’s subject is coincidence, which seems a fair literary interest for someone whose business history includes that hotel.
A honeymoon acquires a spreadsheet
ABSYZ had already been registered when the friends compared their plans in Switzerland. Establishing a company and deciding to give it your working life are separate acts; the second tends to require rather more nerve. Balesh returned to India and left his job. Jain had resigned a month before him.
Their savings supplied the early capital and paid employees while customers and cash flow caught up. They nevertheless spent money travelling to Dreamforce in 2014. It was a considerable purchase of possibility. Their early business depended on meeting people who might trust two founders with real work.
By 2016, their business school, TAPMI, was celebrating ABSYZ’s Best Consulting Startup Award. The friends belonged to its class of 2010. A relationship formed before either had a company to run had become part of the company’s foundations. Shared history could not produce a customer contract, but it gave the partnership somewhere to stand.
An engineer learns the customer’s language
Balesh’s professional beginnings were in a classroom. He has described starting as a guest lecturer at his own alma mater before joining Alcatel as a telecom engineer. Engineering preceded consulting, which preceded the varied duties of a founder. The sequence matters: his executive career grew out of work with systems and customers.
He studied engineering at Cochin University of Science and Technology and completed his PGDM at TAPMI in 2010. That year brought him into Salesforce consulting at Lister Technologies. Infosys followed, including the Geneva assignment. The route gave him experience of both technical implementation and the organizational arrangements around it.
A consultant has to translate between people who buy software, people who build it and people who must use it on Monday morning. Each group has a perfectly reasonable vocabulary, and considerable scope for misunderstanding the others. Balesh’s later career would keep returning to that translation problem, even as the fashionable technology changed.
“Book tickets. Reach SF. Meet people.”
Balesh’s retrospective account of the 2014 marketing plan
The business behind the software
In a 2016 essay, Balesh argued that startups should adopt customer relationship management software early. He used a practical example: a customer’s small trickle of invoices had developed into a much larger operation, while the underlying system kept track of leads, quotations and payments. Maintaining the information properly from the beginning made later questions easier to answer.
It was an argument about the future expressed through the accounts department. Ambition sounds splendid until someone asks what is overdue. A company that can answer promptly has given its optimism some administrative support.
ABSYZ applied the same attention to its own operations. Its Salesforce customer story describes replacing disconnected tools and manual processes with a shared platform. The reported results included a 25% rise in sales productivity and campaigns that could be prepared in three to four hours rather than a day. Onboarding went digital too.
Reported increase in sales productivity
After consolidating sales data and automating processes on Salesforce. Historical company-reported result.The improvements reveal what interested him: the accumulated effect of fewer disconnected tasks. There is a human dividend in having less information to re-enter, fewer documents to chase and a clearer answer to the next customer’s question.
An acquisition, then more work
Youngsoft acquired a majority stake in ABSYZ in January 2019. At the time, the business had more than 130 employees and had completed over 100 Salesforce projects. Balesh was identified as director and CTO. His explanation of the deal emphasized access to additional technical capabilities, while the companies described an opportunity to serve more North American customers.
He became CEO in 2019. The acquisition and the leadership change sit close together in his career, but an acquisition is scarcely a full stop for the people who continue running the business. New relationships bring another set of promises to keep.
In December 2024, ABSYZ announced Salesforce Summit Partner status. Its progress had continued well beyond the first customer wins and the transaction. By then, Balesh’s remit extended across the familiar founder’s collection of responsibilities: delivery, hiring, finance, sales and culture. The title on a business card is mercifully shorter than the job.
- 2014Dreamforce with Anshul Jain
- 2019Youngsoft’s majority investment; the CEO chapter
- 2026Leading Abilytics
A room full of familiar faces
Dreamforce became a recurring appointment. In a 2026 recollection, Balesh contrasted the straightforward logistics of his first trip with the elaborate promotional video he had made for his tenth. Conference marketing had apparently acquired a film director’s ambitions. His account was amused by his own participation in the spectacle.
There is a quieter continuity underneath the joke. For a consultant, an ecosystem consists of people as much as products. Returning to a conference means renewing conversations that began under an earlier logo, job title or version of the software.
At TDX Bengaluru in 2025, he spoke about Salesforce careers for newcomers alongside Nitish Kumar and Subrat Kumar Ray. He recalled entering the field through a campus recruitment opportunity at Lister Technologies. Fifteen years later, he was helping a new intake consider the same profession. A career had become something he could explain to the people standing at its entrance.
The author has other arrangements
His 2025 collection, Serendipity: A Chain Of Impossible Coincidences, gives the profile another direction. Its stories bring speculative fiction into conversation with mythology, science and chance. The attraction is easy to appreciate: fiction permits a writer to make improbable connections without first submitting a project estimate.
There is a pleasing tension between the two occupations. Consulting asks for a dependable sequence of events. A story can make a delicious mess of the sequence. Both require attention to connections, although a fictional character may tolerate rather more mystery than an enterprise customer.
Writing also gives Balesh somewhere to put interests that will never fit neatly beneath a corporate title. He has published commentary on CRM and India’s digital economy, while his fiction travels elsewhere entirely. That range gives a more human outline to the executive biography. A person can have a quarterly target and still wonder what would happen if chance took liberties with the plot.
A new problem with familiar edges
Abilytics announced Balesh’s appointment as CEO on January 21, 2026. The company is headquartered in Pleasanton, California, with a Global Capability Centre in Kochi. Its leadership team now identifies him as CEO and co-founder, alongside CTO Ajish Cherian and other engineering and operations leaders.
His stated focus is AI orchestration: connecting models, data systems and software agents so they can work together in an enterprise. A useful demonstration is only the beginning of that assignment. The surrounding business still needs permissions, dependable workflows and a clear understanding of what the system is doing.
A conceptual view of AI orchestration, reflecting his stated focus at Abilytics.
For Balesh, that creates a recognizable assignment in a newer field. The CRM years involved bringing separate business activities into a system people could use. The AI work adds models and agents to the cast. His ambition is to help enterprises move beyond isolated experiments into applications they can operate with confidence.
He also serves as founder and president of Octahedron Consulting, where his advisory work draws on running a business across growth, delivery, people and governance. The experience acquired at ABSYZ now has more than one outlet. There are several ways to remain useful after leaving the organization that first made your name.
Room for another first line
In his ABSYZ farewell, Balesh described a departure made with clarity. He thanked colleagues, customers and partners, and spoke about a business moving toward professional management. Hyderabad would remain his base. The invitation to meet over coffee survived the change of job.
There is something appealingly ordinary about that detail. After years of building an international consultancy, the next conversation can still begin across a table. The equipment has improved since Lucerne. The willingness to open a discussion remains useful.
His announcement of the Abilytics role borrowed a programmer’s first greeting: “Hello world to AI orchestration”. It is a small phrase for a substantial restart. He brings the accumulated experience of building ABSYZ, friendships formed before it existed, and an author’s interest in what happens next. This time, at least, nobody needs to interrupt a honeymoon.