Ganesh Rama­krishna

Ganesh Ramakrishna trained as a mechanical engineer in Mumbai, then crossed an ocean to earn a master's degree in operations research at Purdue University. That combination — physical systems thinking married to mathematical optimization — became the throughline of everything that followed.

Before founding anything, he ran global leadership roles at IBM. Long enough to see how enterprises actually use software. Long enough to develop strong opinions about how they shouldn't.

In 2010, he co-founded Opex Analytics in Chicago. The premise was simple and the execution was not: build custom AI and machine learning solutions for Fortune 500 companies trying to make better decisions about their supply chains. Over nine years, Opex grew to 140 people. The work was real. The clients were household names. And in October 2019, LLamasoft acquired Opex to form what it called an "applied AI" powerhouse in supply chain analytics.

Ganesh stayed. As Senior Vice President, he ran the combined business and — in a move that most founders never get to witness — watched the company he helped build become part of a $1.5 billion acquisition when Coupa Software bought LLamasoft in 2020.

Most people would have stopped there. Ganesh started taking notes.

In 2021, Ganesh founded Lyric with a specific thesis: the supply chain software industry had built the wrong thing for thirty years. Every major platform asked companies to conform to its data model, its workflow logic, its definition of what a supply chain problem looks like. The result was expensive implementations, low adoption, and decisions made on stale data by analysts who couldn't wait for IT.

Lyric took the opposite position. The platform is composable — meaning teams can assemble the decision models they need from modular building blocks, rather than inheriting whatever the vendor decided. It's AI-native, meaning optimization, simulation, and forecasting are structural features, not bolt-ons. And it's fast to deploy: where legacy platforms take quarters to implement, Lyric measures onboarding in weeks.

The results arrived quickly. Lyric emerged from stealth and within 18 months had achieved 500% revenue growth. By mid-2025, nearly 30 global enterprises had signed on — names like Coca-Cola, Mondelez International, Owens & Minor, Estée Lauder, and Google. A Coca-Cola supply chain executive put it bluntly: "The marriage of managing your data and actually using it in modeling — all in one place — that was the difference maker."

In August 2025, Lyric closed a $43.5M Series B led by Insight Partners, bringing total funding to $67 million. The round included Primary Venture Partners, Permanent Capital Ventures, VMG Partners, PSP Growth, and NewBuild Venture Capital — a coalition that stretches from enterprise software specialists to consumer growth investors betting on AI infrastructure.