At CES in 2022, Chandra Kotaru had a very domestic problem to discuss: how to make the next generation of television appealing to the person at home. A new standard could improve what broadcasters transmitted. Convincing somebody to care required applications, usable equipment and a reason to return. Engineering, in other words, had acquired a customer.
Kotaru, then speaking as Gaian Solutions’ founder and chief executive, described a year spent on research and development. His emphasis was on tools that could turn the new capabilities into a worthwhile consumer experience. It is a useful introduction to the founder now leading Mobius by Gaian. Before the conversations about AI agents came years of work on getting information from one place to another, and making the journey commercially useful.
There is a particular pleasure in this version of a technology career. The nouns are tangible: receivers, screens, signals, devices. They give the larger ambitions something to stand on. A clever network can inspire an excellent presentation; a useful network has to survive the journey home.
The machinery before the message
Kotaru’s earlier career took him through DIRECTV, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Ericsson and Nagravision, in architecture and technology innovation roles. These were businesses concerned with how content moves, how services fit together and how viewers receive the result. His professional roots lie in that machinery behind the screen.
Gaian Group followed, with his founder role dating to 2006. His Gaian Solutions founder role is recorded from 2007. The distinction matters less to the story than the continuity of subject: distribution became the basis of a business he could shape himself. Based in Laguna Beach, California, he developed a career connecting American media technology with work in India.
Gaian’s original territory covered the stages that viewers rarely notice: capturing content, bringing it into a system, managing rights and assets, and distributing or streaming it. Cable, satellite and internet television offered different routes to the audience. Behind a smooth viewing experience sits a considerable amount of coordination. The glamour generally belongs to whoever appears on screen. The coordination receives the support ticket.
- DeliveryHow does information reach its audience?
- ApplicationsWhat useful services can run on the network?
- ParticipationWho gets the tools to build those services?
A platform earns its keep
By 2015, a cloud content delivery platform associated with Kotaru appeared in the DST-Lockheed Martin India Innovation Growth Programme’s compendium of selected technologies. He was named as its innovator. The proposition addressed the expense of operating a content delivery service, including the capital a provider would otherwise need to commit.
The platform’s description also concerned richer services, analytics and understanding audience behaviour. Delivery was becoming something a business could operate with more information about the people at the other end. That combination of distribution and commercial use would recur in his later public work.
It also establishes a helpful scale for reading his story. This was a platform concerned with the costs and capabilities of an operator. The questions were practical and interconnected: what has to be installed, what can be managed centrally, and what can a provider offer once the basic delivery problem has been addressed? Those questions make a less theatrical pitch than a technological revolution. They are also rather harder to evade.
When the message is a warning
Some of Kotaru’s work concerned information with a different purpose. He was chief architect for an Indian platform delivering tsunami and ocean-weather alerts and advisories. His work in that field put the same broad discipline of information delivery into a public-warning setting, where the message must travel through the available channels to the people who need it.
In September 2019, he was listed as a member of the US Federal Communications Commission’s Communications Security, Reliability, and Interoperability Council VII. His affiliation combined Gaian Group with the Advanced Warning and Response Network, or AWARN, Alliance.
The working-group assignments were specific: alert-originator operating procedures, security risks in emerging 5G implementations, and broadcast resiliency. Together, they place him at the intersection of technology design, operational practice and communications infrastructure. A warning system involves more than composing a warning; someone has to originate it, networks must carry it, and the delivery arrangements must hold up.
That work adds substance to the familiar founder’s phrase about connecting people. Here, the connection has a defined job. It needs procedures as well as equipment. Reliability becomes a shared undertaking across agencies, network operators and broadcasters. No single product demonstration can settle all of it.
A television signal with other plans
In October 2019, Kotaru appeared in the NextGen TV Day demonstrations recorded at WKAR’s Media Innovation Lab at Michigan State University. The programme brought together applications for emergency alerting, mobility research and educational content. His Gaian presentation sat inside an exploration of what the broadcast technology could support.
It is an instructive setting. The television standard was being discussed through uses, in a public-media laboratory, with people bringing different problems to the same infrastructure. Education, alerts and mobility do not ask identical things of a network. Putting them in one programme made the range visible.
The recording runs for more than an hour and brings Kotaru’s presentation together with those of Fred Engel, Shelia Cotten and Mark Corl. Their subjects show the breadth of the event: a broadcast technology could enter a conversation about a vehicle, a classroom or an emergency message. Each proposed use supplied a different test for the equipment.
By CES 2022, Kotaru was discussing a receiver stack combining hardware and software. His examples reached beyond a conventional television set to connected devices and vehicle dashboards. Gaian was also showing an app generator intended to make it easier for broadcasters to develop applications. Receiving a signal was becoming the starting point for a wider set of services.
“We worked on building tools that will make NextGen TV appealing to consumers.”
Chandra Kotaru, CES 2022
The economic question accompanied the engineering. Later that year, he joined a Detroit conference panel on monetizing the ATSC 3.0 ecosystem, alongside representatives from NBC Universal, ONE Media and Verance. The panel’s subject was how expanded service capabilities could produce revenue, including opportunities beyond familiar television income.
A marketplace also entered his CES discussion: broadcasters collaborating, forming alliances and finding ways to work together. That is a revealing extension of the receiver argument. Once equipment can support more services, businesses need arrangements that let those services travel across organisational boundaries. The network diagram eventually becomes a conversation about cooperation.
For the CES 2022 discussion, ATSC president Madeleine Noland brought Kotaru together with Mark Aitken of Sinclair and ONE Media, and Anne Schelle of Pearl TV. It placed the technology supplier beside people working on broadcast deployment and business coordination. The range of roles suited a subject that required several kinds of organisation to move together.
At CES 2023, Gaian described its offering as a low-code and no-code platform for monetizing spectrum, content and applications. The emphasis included tools and a marketplace through which partners could launch digital services. The product vocabulary was already moving toward easier creation, a useful bridge to the company’s subsequent AI agenda.
A company history hidden in a farewell
For a more personal glimpse, consider what Kotaru chose to remember when longtime colleague Chaitanya Mahanthi left Gaian. His public tribute included the Indian Railways display network, presentations to government figures and the implementation of India’s tsunami alerting platform. He also remembered selecting contract manufacturers in Taiwan and China, and receiving the first shipment of media-player devices.
The shipment is the detail that gives the story its texture. Alongside official demonstrations sits the arrival of something the team had arranged to have made. A business history can live quite comfortably in a delivery box.
Kotaru praised Mahanthi’s patience, problem-solving and ability to lead a team. Mahanthi replied by thanking him for guidance and describing him as a mentor. It is a bounded glimpse of one working relationship, warm because the memories are particular. The products had names; so did the people who helped deliver them.
From building apps to building agents
The 2024 World Summit AI agenda put another subject beside Kotaru’s name: objective-driven enterprise AI and a no-code agent factory from Mobius. The application-building question had acquired a new technical setting. People were being invited to consider software agents as part of how an enterprise operates.
The agenda placed the session among practical enterprise AI discussions, with other programme items addressing implementation and the work people would do alongside agents. Kotaru’s subject fitted that operational emphasis: how an enterprise might use objective-driven AI, and how a no-code factory might let it create agents for that purpose.
Mobius’s own description brings together low-code development, AI and decentralised verification. These are the company’s chosen ingredients for its digital transformation work. For a reader following Kotaru’s career, the earlier app generator offers a concrete point of comparison: both product agendas concern giving other organisations tools with which to create services.
The ambition has since broadened further. In October 2026, the Mobius website presents a vision under the Rasa Foundation, centred on truth, accountability and shared access to intelligence. It describes a foundation-led structure with commercial activity supporting common resources. These are stated commitments and design aims; their interest lies in what the organisation is choosing to make central.
For Kotaru, the public story now stretches from the delivery of a signal to the governance of intelligence. The vocabulary has grown more philosophical. The earlier projects remain a useful way to keep the story human: a receiver somebody can use, a warning that reaches an audience, an application a broadcaster can build. And, somewhere in the company’s remembered past, a first shipment arriving.