Hari Sethalapathy and the business of earning trust

The client thought Winfo was too small. For a young consultancy, this is a peculiarly circular objection: you need substantial work to become substantial, but substantial work would prefer you to have become substantial already. Hari Sethalapathy and his fellow founders encountered exactly that predicament. The client who doubted their size eventually became their first major breakthrough.

That episode belongs near the beginning of Hari's story because it explains the stakes better than a job title. He is now co-founder and CEO of Winfo Solutions, based in the London area, working in the world of enterprise applications, Oracle systems and automation. The business began with three founders and no clients. By February 2026, its founders were describing a team of more than 400 people working across a dozen countries.

The distance between those two pictures is the story. An established employer supplies a consultant with a reputation before the consultant enters the room. Founders have to earn one under their own name. Hari and his partners did so by taking on work that larger firms could not. Smallness, initially an objection, gave them room to find their opening.

An accountant among the applications

Hari's professional background gives his interest in business results some substance. He is a qualified accountant whose work has encompassed functional consulting, solution architecture and programme leadership. These are different seats at the same complicated table: understanding what a business requires, deciding how a system should support it, and getting the programme delivered.

Enterprise resource planning, usually shortened to ERP, is software for the recurring business of a business: finance, purchasing, operations and the information connecting them. The initials sound tidier than the work. An application can be technically available while its users still spend their afternoons navigating awkward processes. A successful installation leaves a further question: has the working day actually improved?

That question runs through Hari's public work. In a UK Oracle User Group presentation with Steven Murphy of ICON, he addressed an upgrade to Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2.10. The emphasis was on aligning the application and technology changes with business priorities. The subject was specific, practical and concerned with extracting more from an existing investment.

It also supplies a useful glimpse of his career before today's conversation about AI. His interest in the usefulness of technology has an earlier, less fashionable setting. Before agents became a topic for executive interviews, he was discussing how an established enterprise system could better serve the organisation using it. There is a certain professional consistency in returning to the same question while the machinery changes.

His titles have changed along the way. In 2021, Hari was identified as a Winfo managing director. For Oracle CloudWorld in 2024, he was introduced as co-founder and chief operating officer. By the December 2025 WinfoAgents announcement, his title was co-founder and CEO. Those names place him in several parts of the business as it developed. They also give the company story a personal trajectory: a consultant with an accounting qualification, an operating role and responsibility for leading the enterprise. The title at the end carries the combined demands of the earlier work. Customers still need their systems to function, colleagues need an organisation that supports delivery, and a growing company needs choices about where to invest next.

Three founders, then a larger table

Winfo's founding group comprises Hari, chairman Viswanatha Raju Dandu and chief commercial officer Venkata Nori. Hari and Nori had delivered major transformation programmes within large consulting firms before building their own business. The venture gave them a chance to make decisions about service and client relationships themselves, with all the exposure that comes with having nobody else's name above the door.

Growing the firm brought a second change of scale: the leadership arrangements had to grow with it. In their conversation with John Howard on Unlocking Value, Hari and Nori discussed bringing in outside board advice and changing the organisation's leadership structures. They connected that external perspective with the company's subsequent growth. A founder can possess considerable experience and still benefit from another person at the table.

“Discuss. Decide. Deliver.”

The operating mantra described by Winfo's co-founders

The three verbs are pleasingly economical. They allow for conversation, require a choice and finish with an obligation. The final word is the demanding one. An organisation with hundreds of colleagues needs decisions to travel beyond the people who originally made them. Otherwise, the founders become the meeting everyone is waiting to schedule.

That is the interesting leadership problem inside Winfo's expansion. The founders wanted a business grounded in trust and sustained client partnership. As the headcount increased, those intentions needed structures through which other people could act. Bringing in advisers is a concrete part of that account; it makes the growth story less solitary and considerably more believable.

Five is a surprisingly useful number

Winfo has also given its approach to early delivery an unusually memorable timetable. Its “FIT in 5” proposition moves from a five-minute demonstration through five hours of discovery to a proof of concept in five days. Five weeks is the stated target for putting an agreed proof-of-value scope live, followed by five months of monitoring and improvement.

The repetition does some marketing work, naturally. It also makes the sequence easy to inspect. Discovery comes before the working demonstration in a customer's environment; monitoring comes after the first live scope. The proposal recognises that an initial result and an enduring result occupy different places on the calendar.

For a reader trying to understand Hari's professional preoccupation, this is more revealing than a catalogue of software names. It turns the abstract promise of business value into successive things a customer should be able to examine. The appeal lies in shortening the distance between a conversation and something that works.

The next application still needs a person

In December 2025, Winfo formally announced WinfoAgents on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The product was presented as a set of AI agents intended to work alongside people and integrate with enterprise systems. It extended the company's work in automation into a field where software can coordinate more of a process, with decisions about access and oversight becoming part of the design.

Hari described the mission as “turning technology into measurable outcomes”. The phrasing is consistent with the earlier upgrade discussion and the staged delivery proposition. New capabilities had arrived, but the customer still needed a reason to use them. The announcement positioned agents as a means of improving operations; the business result remained the promised destination.

His conversation with Vikramsinh Ghatge on TechDogs' Discover Dialogues returned to the gap between buying technology and receiving the expected benefit. It covered intelligent automation, partnerships and workforce readiness. The argument put considerable responsibility on the organisation adopting the system: people need to learn, processes need to change, and the work needs to produce something useful after launch.

There is a welcome limit to the magic in that account. Winfo's stated mission assigns people responsibility for judgement, governance, quality and outcomes while AI accelerates execution. For Hari's leadership story, that division matters. Selling greater automation creates a corresponding obligation to explain how responsibility survives it. A machine may complete a task; somebody still has to decide whether it was the right task.

A new address for the work

On 30 January 2026, Winfo announced a development centre in Chennai. Its initial remit included product engineering, Oracle Cloud and E-Business Suite services, AI and machine-learning work, test automation and DevOps. Here was a physical expansion alongside the new software proposition: more capacity to build, maintain and deliver what the company was offering.

Hari called the opening “a major milestone in Winfo's growth story”. The company's plans included training, engineering leadership development and collaboration across time zones. These are grounded concerns for a business serving customers in several markets. A global footprint creates the need to pass work between people who may be starting and ending their days at different hours.

The centre also brings the story back to the founders' early problem. Winning a substantial engagement requires confidence that the work can be delivered. Building delivery capacity helps make that confidence supportable. The opening belongs in the same account as the first doubtful client, even though the office photograph looks very different from a three-person beginning.

Ireland gets another chapter

There is another setting in Hari's public life where partnerships have taken a more sporting form. The Dublin Guardians introduced Hari and Nori as co-owners, describing their professional and personal connections with Ireland over two decades. For two people publicly associated with enterprise software, a cricket team adds a rather different appointment to the diary.

Hari's response was direct: “Ireland has been an important part of our journey for many years”. He expressed enthusiasm about giving back through the Guardians. The team's introduction placed the partnership in the context of sport and community, giving the relationship a purpose beyond another business location on a map.

The connection makes a fitting final scene for a career built around working relationships. Hari's business story includes co-founders, clients, advisers, colleagues and technology partners. The cricket venture adds a team in the literal sense. Across those settings, the question remains satisfyingly concrete: what can these people build together, and what will it amount to when the talking ends?