# Pranjal Daga

> Pranjal Daga is the co-founder and CEO of Accend (YC S23), a San Francisco fintech building human-in-the-loop AI agents for commercial credit underwriting and compliance at banks and fintechs. Before Accend he led AI product on the Risk team at Brex, where his work helped prevent roughly $20M in fraud losses, and earlier helped build Cisco Innovation Labs from a single person to a 35-person team. He dropped out of a PhD in AI/ML at Purdue to chase the build, has done research at Adobe and IBM, and is racing to replace slow, manual back-office compliance work with audit-ready AI.

- **Role:** Co-Founder & CEO at Accend
- **Organizations:** Accend, Brex, Cisco Innovation Labs, Vonzos Partners, Adobe Research, IBM Research
- **Nationality:** Indian
- **Education:** PhD in AI/ML (dropped out); Masters in Computer Science, specializing in Deep Learning and NLP, Purdue University, Ignite program, Stanford Graduate School of Business
- **Known for:** Co-founded Accend (YC S23), AI infrastructure for commercial underwriting, Raised $3.2M seed from Adverb Ventures, Y Combinator, General Catalyst, 645 Ventures, and angels from Brex, Stripe and Carta, Led AI product on Brex's Risk team; work tied to preventing roughly $20M in fraud losses

## Career timeline

- **—** — ML research roles at Adobe Research and IBM Research
- **—** — Began PhD in AI/ML at Purdue University, then dropped out
- **—** — Helped set up Cisco Innovation Labs, growing the team from 1 to 35 over four years
- **—** — Led Product for AI/Risk at Brex; work helped prevent ~$20M in fraud losses
- **2023** — Co-founded Accend with Yutong Pei and Joseph Zhou; joined Y Combinator (Summer 2023 batch)
- **2024** — Accend raised $3.2M seed round led by Adverb Ventures

## Achievements

- Co-founded Accend (YC S23), AI infrastructure for commercial underwriting
- Raised $3.2M seed from Adverb Ventures, Y Combinator, General Catalyst, 645 Ventures, and angels from Brex, Stripe and Carta
- Led AI product on Brex's Risk team; work tied to preventing roughly $20M in fraud losses
- Grew Cisco Innovation Labs from 1 person to a 35-person team in 4 years
- Customers including Corpay, Brex, Rippling, Rho, Column and Settle reduced application processing time by up to 80%
- Published ML researcher (Google Scholar) across NLP, computer vision and graph neural networks
- Frequent speaker at Money20/20, FinovateSpring, Banking Tech Awards and Machine Learning Week

## Latest updates

- **2024-07** — Accend publicly announced its $3.2M seed round to reinvent fintech operations and compliance workflows.
- **2025-03** — Accend featured in Y Combinator announcements and industry lists; Pranjal active sharing milestones on LinkedIn.

## Links

- Website: https://withaccend.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pranjaldaga
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/withaccend
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pranjaldaga/

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/pranjal-daga
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-21