The Lab That Ships
From Engineer to Entrepreneur
March 1999. Nagpal joins NIIT Limited as a Sr. Systems Associate. It's one of India's largest IT training firms and a factory for technical talent heading toward the global tech boom. He moves quickly - by 2000 he's at NTT DATA, spending five years as a software engineer before pivoting to a Technical Manager and Product Consultant role at Interra IT.
Then Oxford. One year. An MBA from Said Business School is a deliberate interruption - a forced context switch for someone who had been deep in engineering for six years. It's the kind of education that doesn't change what you know so much as how you frame what you're about to do with it.
Capital One followed (Sr. Consultant, 2008-2009), then a first CEO stint at Daphne Systems in India (2009-2010), and then six years back at Interra as VP of Engineering - running teams, not just code. By 2016, Nagpal had the full picture: engineering depth, business education, P&L exposure, and enough consulting hours to know exactly what was broken about the traditional model.
Building the Lab
Audax Labs launched in 2016. The word "audax" is Latin for bold or daring - a naming choice that either says something about Nagpal's ambitions or at least rules out cautious timidity as a brand strategy.
The company's early growth tracked the technology waves Nagpal had been watching from inside Interra: AR/VR becoming viable for enterprise use cases. IoT crossing from industrial sensor data to full operational intelligence. AI shifting from research lab to production pipeline. Audax Labs positioned itself across all three - not as a specialist in any one, but as the firm that could wire them together for enterprise clients.
In 2018, Audax Labs launched Augmently, its AR platform for iOS and Android, and a 3D Builder tool for the furniture industry. These weren't theoretical products - they were narrow, specific solutions for industries where 3D visualization had a clear purchase decision attached to it.
The DataBeagle Move
The Hitachi Vantara partnership tells the more interesting story. In 2019, Audax Labs co-developed electronic communications monitoring and compliance technology with Hitachi Vantara. A year later, they licensed the technology exclusively and named it DataBeagle - a product that helps banks and financial institutions review electronically stored information for compliance, discovery, and litigation purposes.
That move transformed a consulting engagement into an owned asset. DataBeagle is now a named product with licensing economics, not just a services arrangement. It's a model that few consultancies attempt and fewer execute cleanly.
Nagpal put it plainly when discussing the banking sector's compliance needs: "Our experience working with European and American banks shows how important it is for these organizations to be able to review and analyze data to deal with investigations." The product exists because the problem is real and recurring, not because the technology was looking for a use case.
2024 and Beyond
In March 2024, Audax Labs achieved Advanced Specialization in DevOps with GitHub on Microsoft Azure - a certification that signals technical depth in modern software delivery pipelines, not just consulting credentials. By June 2025, the company added Rocket Software to its partner roster, extending its modernization practice into legacy systems.
The trajectory is consistent: each year, Audax Labs adds a partnership or certification that expands the addressable problem set. The partner list now spans Microsoft (Gold/Solutions Partner), Google, Amazon AWS, Hitachi Vantara (Premier), Oracle, Intel, Sony, Talend (Gold), and Rocket Software. That's not a vendor relationship map - that's a capability diagram.