Kalyan Kodali and the talent hiding in plain sight

In May 2019, Kalyan “KK” Kodali stood at a lectern in Erie, Pennsylvania, with a proposition that gave a technology expansion a local address. ValueMomentum, the company he had helped build since 2000, planned to establish a regional development center there. The ambition came with figures: more than $5 million in planned investment and 100 associates to be hired over three years. But the most interesting detail was how Erie had entered the conversation. A customer had suggested it.

Tim NeCastro, the CEO of Erie Insurance, had learned that ValueMomentum was considering a regional center. He pitched his own city and introduced the company to local authorities. Kodali described an enthusiastic reception. A business relationship had become an invitation to look at a place differently: as somewhere engineers could learn, work and stay.

There is a pleasing reversal in that sequence. A services company spends much of its life trying to understand a client’s needs. Here, the client understood something the supplier needed, then offered a hometown as an answer. The recruitment conversation had acquired a mayor.

A client with a city in mind

Kodali’s explanation of the Erie decision began with talent. ValueMomentum had been testing graduate trainee development programs in New Jersey. The next step was to find other locations with universities, engineering graduates and a cost of living that made a career there practical. The company wanted to develop people for its digital, data and cloud assignments. A regional center would give that effort a base.

The first Erie plan called for roughly 30 associates to begin in temporary space in June 2019. The scale was modest enough to picture: a team, a place to work, people learning the company’s business. The longer hiring target was an intention, rather than an accomplished result. That distinction matters in a story about building something. Announcements arrive on a schedule; organizations take their own time.

In 2020, ValueMomentum announced the purchase of a downtown building with almost 20,000 square feet and room for approximately 100 associates. Its initial team had been housed at Gannon University’s Erie Technology Incubator. Kodali expressed satisfaction with the local technology talent. A decision first explained through relationships and training now involved the distinctly unglamorous responsibilities of property, space and renovation.

The episode offers a useful way into his career. Kodali’s public work keeps returning to the conditions that let a business deliver: customers who know it, colleagues who can take responsibility, and people who have somewhere to develop their skills. These are ordinary ingredients. Getting them into the same room is the difficult part.

Eighteen years before the corner office

Long before the Erie lectern, Kodali studied economics and management at Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani. He holds a Master of Science in Economics and a Master of Management Studies. His earlier career included Satyam Computer Services and Wipro, across sales, client management, product management and strategic alliances. It is a business-facing route into technology leadership, with plenty of attention to what a customer might actually buy.

He helped incubate ValueMomentum at its inception in 2000. Before becoming CEO, he was president of its Enterprise Business. By the time the top job changed hands, he had spent years working with customers, employees and partners. The company’s familiarity with him preceded the title by a considerable margin.

His appointment took effect on June 1, 2018. Raj Samanthapudi, the founder and previous CEO, moved into the executive chairman role; Swarup Ghosh became chief operating officer. ValueMomentum’s workforce was approaching 2,000. The company paired those appointments with an organizational change intended to help it scale. This was a promotion with a practical assignment attached.

Kodali’s response gave credit to Samanthapudi for the company’s strategy, industry focus and customer orientation. That exchange of credit is a revealing part of the handover. The new CEO had a long history inside the enterprise; the former CEO remained involved. The next stage would have to make room for both continuity and a different allocation of responsibility.

The training room travels

By November 2022, another regional center made the talent-development theme visible on a different continent. ValueMomentum had opened in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, in August. Its facility at TIDEL Park had capacity for 250 associates, already housed more than 150 and was serving clients in the United States. It also had a dedicated training facility. In a business story, that last detail deserves more space than it usually receives.

A training room turns an attractive idea into a recurring obligation. People need instruction, practice and assignments on which their learning becomes useful. Kodali linked Coimbatore to the company’s long-term investment in talent for digital, data and cloud technologies. Chief People Officer Uma Gogineni emphasized access to engineering talent near established educational institutions.

Erie and Coimbatore are different places, connected here by the company’s search for people it could develop. The repeated choice gives the expansion story a human scale. There are clients across an ocean and systems with demanding requirements. There are also graduates close to a university, looking for a first substantial piece of work. An employer has to build the bridge between those two situations.

Learning the customer’s grammar

Insurance supplies the other recurring thread. ValueMomentum announced 75 active insurer customers in June 2023, alongside new responsibilities for several leaders. Jim Carlucci became president, Abhijeet Jhaveri became executive vice president for customer engagement, and Surya “Sunny” Mandapati became senior vice president for business development. Kodali highlighted Carlucci’s work building client relationships. The milestone came with an explanation of who would help carry the next stage.

These relationships have a technical setting, but the work can be described in everyday terms. Insurers need to attract customers, keep them, handle claims, make decisions and run their operations. A technology partner has to understand the connections between those tasks. Each new tool arrives in a business already occupied by people, processes and commitments.

In February 2025, ValueMomentum announced Carlucci’s retirement after 11 years at the company and 42 in insurance. He would remain a strategic advisor. Jhaveri, himself a colleague of more than two decades, would become president in April. Kodali credited Carlucci with growth, advocacy for customers and the company’s transformation. Once again, the next appointment was being made within a network built over time.

The structural change was specific: ValueMomentum had moved from organizing around capabilities toward organizing around insurance value streams. That vocabulary is easier to understand through the work it names. Product and underwriting, distribution and marketing, claims, and enterprise IT became a way to connect technical expertise with an insurer’s business. The customer’s operating problems helped shape the organization chart.

Gogineni’s appointment as president of Technology Solution Centers in May 2025 made the connection more explicit. She retained her chief people officer responsibilities. The centers covered platforms, applications and infrastructure; core systems; data management; and advanced analytics. They were meant to work closely with the insurance business units. Kodali’s endorsement focused on her record of building teams capable of delivering complex solutions.

A bird with a business plan

Then came a bird. In September 2025, ValueMomentum introduced a new identity and a stylized mascot. Marketing chief Joe King explained its blue wing as stability, its green wing as growth and its yellow beak as learning and innovation. The initials V and M were worked into the form. Corporate birds have demanding job descriptions.

Kodali’s accompanying comment concentrated on insurers’ trust and the company’s commitment to them. The redesign followed the organizational realignment. A new image could introduce the business as it now wanted to operate: specialized in property and casualty insurance, with technical work connected more directly to client outcomes. The plumage had a business rationale.

“We decided to focus on building our brand, our talent base, our global reach, and our innovative solutions.”Kalyan Kodali · May 2026

That list came from Kodali’s May 2026 account of the company’s investments. ValueMomentum reported ten new clients in its latest fiscal-year update, extended partnerships in the United Kingdom and its first client engagement in Canada. Its AI work included underwriting workbenches, document processing and claims intelligence. The ambitions had become international, while the examples remained tied to identifiable insurance tasks.

In July, the company announced that ISG had named it a Leader and CX Star Performer in its global insurance IT outsourcing report. The customer-experience assessment drew on direct client feedback across areas including delivery, collaboration and cultural fit. These are company-level recognitions, earned through many people’s work. They are also relevant measures for a CEO whose business depends on relationships lasting beyond a sales conversation.

One smaller account brings the view back to an individual encounter. In a public LinkedIn post, employee Sainath Kuricheti described having a question answered during a fireside chat with Kodali. Afterward, he said, the CEO greeted him by name. Kuricheti wrote that the gesture made his day. It is his recollection of a brief exchange, and its appeal lies in its size: a name remembered after a discussion about an industry’s future.

Kodali’s working world now stretches across markets, technologies and teams. Yet the Erie story still provides a useful scene to return to: a client making an introduction, a city offering a welcome, a CEO considering where the next engineers might come from. Growth, in that picture, begins with paying attention to the people already within reach. The next task is giving them room to learn.