# Ibby Syed

> Ibby Syed is the founder and CEO of Cotera, a New York-based Y Combinator (W22) startup building an agentic AI platform that lets enterprise teams spin up AI agents on top of their own data warehouses. Peloton's first data science hire and a Harvard applied math graduate, he co-founded Cotera with Tom Firth, survived a long stint stuck in the 'consulting trap,' and pivoted the company from a churn-analytics dashboard into a prompt-based AI agent builder now serving customers like Bilt, OpenSea, Skims and Coterie at roughly $1M ARR.

- **Role:** Founder & CEO at Cotera
- **Organizations:** Cotera, Y Combinator (W22), Peloton Interactive, Drift
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** B.A. in Applied Mathematics, Harvard University
- **Known for:** Founder and CEO of Cotera, a Y Combinator W22 company, Peloton's first data science hire; built early ELT, data transformations and production ML, Scaled Cotera to roughly $1M ARR with 15 enterprise customers and a team of ~10

## Career timeline

- **2019** — Graduates Harvard with a B.A. in Applied Mathematics
- **2019-2020** — Data Scientist at Drift, working on time-series and NLP modeling
- **2020-2021** — Joins Peloton as its first data science hire; rises from Data Scientist to Lead to Manager of Data Science, running data for retention, growth and CX
- **2021** — Co-founds Cotera with Tom Firth
- **2022** — Cotera goes through Y Combinator's W22 batch; raises seed funding
- **2022-2023** — Grows a churn-analytics product to ~$150K-$170K ARR but discovers it is really a consulting business
- **2023** — The 'OpenAI moment' - Tom solves a ticket-topic problem in 100 lines of code; Cotera begins pivot to AI agents
- **2024-2025** — Rebuilds Cotera as a prompt-based agentic AI platform on enterprise data warehouses; reaches ~$1M ARR with 15 enterprise customers

## Achievements

- Founder and CEO of Cotera, a Y Combinator W22 company
- Peloton's first data science hire; built early ELT, data transformations and production ML
- Scaled Cotera to roughly $1M ARR with 15 enterprise customers and a team of ~10
- Co-host of the 'Numbers and Narratives' podcast bridging data and customer experience
- Earned a B.A. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University

## Latest updates

- **2025-11** — Featured on The SaaS Podcast (ep. 463) detailing Cotera's pivot from a $150K consulting trap to ~$1M ARR AI SaaS.
- **2025** — Cotera positioned as 'the agentic AI platform for enterprise work,' serving customers including Bilt, OpenSea, Skims and Coterie.

## Links

- Website: https://cotera.co
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ibby/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/coterahq
- GitHub: https://github.com/coterahq
- YouTube: https://youtube.com/@CoteraApp

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/ibby-syed
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-24