Building at the intersection of infrastructure and human experience
The challenge Piyush Rajput set for himself in 2014 wasn't purely technical - though it was certainly that. It was fundamentally about closing a gap between what enterprise software promised and what employees actually experienced day-to-day. Most corporate intranets at the time were SharePoint deployments that people used only when forced to. Simpplr's founding bet was that a better-designed, more opinionated platform would see genuine adoption.
As SVP of Engineering, Rajput's fingerprints are on every architectural decision that makes that adoption possible. The platform handles personalized content delivery across multichannel communications - email, mobile, push - while maintaining enterprise-grade security compliance and data privacy requirements. Under the hood, it's running Elasticsearch for search, Kubernetes for orchestration, and an increasingly sophisticated AI layer that includes tools from both OpenAI and Anthropic.
The AI Turn
What's notable about Simpplr's AI stack is how purposeful it looks in retrospect. The company didn't graft AI onto a legacy platform - it has been building with AI-native infrastructure from the point when that infrastructure became viable. LangGraph for agentic workflows. LlamaIndex for RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipelines. Pinecone and Weaviate as vector databases. Grafana and Prometheus for observability. Coralogix for log management. This is not accidental - it reflects deliberate engineering choices made by a team that saw where enterprise software was heading.
The result is an AI layer that can power intelligent employee search (not just keyword matching, but semantic understanding of intent), AI agents that can answer HR questions autonomously, and a writing assistant that helps internal communications teams produce content faster. Rajput's team has built the kind of enterprise AI infrastructure that most companies are still trying to procure.
The Customer Retention Signal
In SaaS, net revenue retention is the number that doesn't lie. Simpplr's 95% customer retention is a remarkable signal for an enterprise software company. It suggests that the platform is embedded in daily workflows - not just purchased and underused. That level of stickiness is engineered, not marketed. It's a product of the architectural choices Rajput and his team have made over a decade: reliability, mobile accessibility, deep integration with identity and HRIS systems, and enough flexibility that customers can adapt the platform to their specific org structure without rewriting it from scratch.
The BYOI (Bring Your Own Integration) framework, launched in 2024, extended this further - letting customers embed their own third-party applications directly into the Simpplr experience. It's the kind of platform-thinking that separates companies building for the long term from those chasing a product release cycle.
The India-Canada-California axis
Simpplr operates across India, Canada, the UK, and its California headquarters - and Rajput himself exemplifies that distribution, working from the Greater Toronto Area while overseeing engineering for a California-incorporated company. Simpplr's engineering talent is distributed across these geographies, which gives the company both cost efficiency and the ability to recruit from three distinct technical talent pools. It's a configuration that Rajput, having himself navigated the India-to-North America career trajectory, is well-positioned to manage.
His direct reports include a Senior Director of Engineering, a VP of Technology, and a VP of Product Management - a structure that reflects the maturing of Simpplr from early-stage startup into a scaled enterprise software company with multiple product lines running simultaneously.