A lunch invitation from the chief executive can make an employee reconsider the ordinary business of eating. Senthil Kumar Vijaya Kumar felt excited and a little nervous when Kumar Kanakamedala asked whether he was free. He expected formality. What followed was a candid conversation about the next five to ten years of his career, and a question that reached beyond the menu: how had his CEO learned to think that way?
Kanakamedala’s answer, as his colleague recalled it, was exposure. Vijaya Kumar came away struck by the breadth of his appetite for risk and the clarity of his principles. The account offers an unusually human introduction to Anblicks’s co-founder and CEO. Before the acquisitions, partner credentials, and corporate vocabulary, there is a person suggesting that judgment improves when the world gets bigger.
It is an appealingly practical answer. Experience can accumulate without anyone changing their mind. Exposure implies an encounter with something outside the familiar circle: a different problem, a different specialist, a different way of deciding. In Kanakamedala’s business life, those encounters have often taken an organizational form. He has built a company that keeps adding people who know things it needs to learn.
The room gets larger
Known professionally as Kumar, Tirumala Kumar Kanakamedala is based in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. His education includes Sathyabama University, where his public professional profile records the years 1994 to 1998. That places his university years before today’s cloud platforms and the current enthusiasm for enterprise AI. The tools have changed considerably; businesses still need someone who can translate an operational problem into work a technical team can actually deliver.
Anblicks dates its founding to 2004. Its current leadership biography credits Kanakamedala with scaling it from three employees to more than 800 professionals globally, serving more than 50 Fortune 1000 customers. Those are company-reported figures, and they describe a change in the nature of his job as much as a change in scale. Three people can share most decisions by conversation. Eight hundred need a company that can function beyond any one person’s reach.
From the original employee count to a global professional team, as described in Anblicks’s leadership biography. No growth rate or elapsed period is implied.
The same biography describes more than 25 years of leadership experience across consulting, cloud, data, and AI. The interesting task inside those labels is coordination. An enterprise consultancy has to get technical knowledge, customer expectations, delivery schedules, and commercial judgment into the same conversation. Growth multiplies the number of conversations. A founder’s attention becomes a resource that must be allocated with some care.
Inviting expertise through the front door
In August 2020, Anblicks completed its acquisition of KNOWARTH. The acquired business brought expertise in modern applications and cloud infrastructure, complementing Anblicks’s work on data strategy and the foundations for analytics and AI. Kanakamedala described the combination in terms of helping enterprises bring cloud, data, and applications together around their business objectives.
The deal also widened the company’s intended geographical reach. Alongside its existing US and Indonesian markets, Anblicks identified Australia, the Middle East, Singapore, and India as additional markets the acquisition would help it serve. For a leader who talks about exposure, that is a concrete expansion of the field of view: new teams, new customers, and more settings in which an engineering approach has to prove useful.
Acquisitions can look wonderfully tidy in an announcement. Two company names become one sentence. The operational reality is more demanding: different skills must become a shared capability. What stands out in this transaction is the combination Kanakamedala sought. Data expertise gained adjacent application and infrastructure knowledge, the parts that help information move into something people can use in their working day.
A second Kumar, a retail perspective
Another such encounter arrived in June 2024, when Anblicks acquired Krya Insights, a specialist data and AI firm with retail expertise. Its founder and CEO, Kumar Raman, joined Anblicks as chief product and technology officer. Kanakamedala’s public explanation emphasized the fit between Krya’s industry knowledge and Anblicks’s existing capabilities, with the aim of offering more industry-specific solutions.
Raman brought more than 20 years of experience, including data architecture, engineering, integration, and business consulting. His new remit included architecture, technology, and solutions for different industries. The appointment put an experienced founder inside the leadership team with responsibility for shaping what the combined company would build.
There is a useful distinction here between collecting capabilities and giving someone authority to put them to work. Bringing a founder into a product and technology role makes the latter intention visible. For Kanakamedala, the wider view includes another person’s judgment at the table. The retail knowledge acquired with Krya would sit close to decisions about the company’s technical direction.
“Their deep industry knowledge and innovative AI solutions perfectly complement our own offerings.”Kumar Kanakamedala, on the Krya Insights acquisition, June 2024
The value of getting closer to the platform
Anblicks’s Snowflake relationship provides another view of his priorities. In October 2023, the company announced Elite tier partner status. Kanakamedala connected that recognition to access: upcoming Snowflake features could help Anblicks reduce the time required to bring work to customers. His explanation concerned what the relationship would let the team do next.
The announcement also set out an intention to invest in the partnership and use the Snowflake Native App Framework to build and distribute accelerators. These are reusable tools or components that can reduce repeated engineering effort. For a consultancy, reusable work creates an interesting discipline. Each engagement teaches something specific; some of that knowledge can become useful again, provided the next customer’s circumstances actually fit.
That is another version of exposure becoming organizational memory. A team meets a problem, learns its structure, and carries some of that learning forward. Kanakamedala’s stated interest in earlier access to platform capabilities fits this approach. The company has to keep learning while it delivers, rather than treating a credential as a comfortable place to stop.
Even the technology CEO has paperwork
His own company once supplied a rather less glamorous lesson. Anblicks’s accounts payable depended on physical folders, printed checks, and people being in the office. Kanakamedala was personally reviewing supporting paperwork before signing payments. A business selling technical change had acquired a stubbornly physical administrative habit. Paper, it seems, has an excellent retention strategy.
Anblicks engaged Mueller dotKonnect, which introduced BILL and redesigned the workflow. Separate responsibilities and access controls covered processing, review, validation, approval, and release of funds. Paper checks became an exception for required statutory payments. The change gave Kanakamedala a more controlled process and reduced the burden of the old arrangement.
His advice afterward emphasized finding a strategic finance partner with the right combination of resources and judgment. He used the word “brainware” for that advisory capacity. It is a slightly cheerful word for a serious purchasing decision: software is useful, and somebody still has to understand what the business needs. The episode gives his wider corporate strategy a smaller, recognizable counterpart. Sometimes the person who expands your view is the one who helps sort out the bills.
What the next phase asks of people
By June 2026, Anblicks was announcing a Snowflake CoCo Preferred Partner Badge and describing work with Snowflake’s AI coding agent across engineering and automated workflows. Kanakamedala’s remarks emphasized production discipline, shorter development cycles, and reducing repetitive engineering work so practitioners could spend more attention on customer decisions.
The company connected this work to its AI Factory Construct, described as an eight-week operating model, and to a library of more than 100 accelerators. These are descriptions of its delivery approach. They also locate his aspiration quite clearly: move AI work into operating businesses, with reusable engineering and teams capable of maintaining the result. The ambition brings the conversation back to how people spend their time.
In October 2026, Anblicks announced its second consecutive Great Place To Work certification in India, valid from September 2026 through September 2027. Kanakamedala credited colleagues who ask difficult questions, take ownership, and expect more of one another. The company described employee feedback as an input to leadership decisions. That gives the lunch conversation an institutional echo: a wider view also requires listening inside the organization.
An education contribution, in person
On July 20, 2026, Kanakamedala donated ₹1 crore, or ten million rupees, to the TTD Sri Venkateswara Vidyadana Trust. He presented the demand drafts to temple deputy executive officer Lokanatham at the Ranganayakula Mandapam inside the Sri Venkateswara Temple in Tirumala. The contribution supported an education trust, extending his public activity beyond enterprise technology.
Placed beside the career conversation over lunch, the contribution offers two distinct expressions of an interest in opportunity. One involves time and advice given to a colleague. The other involves money given to an educational institution. They operate at different scales, and each is a concrete action rather than a slogan about potential.
The word exposure is modest enough to survive all this corporate expansion. It does not require a stage or a new management theory. It asks a person to encounter more of the world and reconsider the limits of their current view. For Kanakamedala, that can mean another founder joining the leadership team, a new technical capability, or a colleague leaving lunch with a longer horizon. A useful conversation can travel surprisingly far after the plates are cleared.