Prem
Kiran

Prem Kiran graduated top of his class at the University of Madras - summa cum laude, ranked first, gold medal in hand. The degree was in electrical engineering. The career he built was something else entirely.

He went to SAP. And then he stayed at SAP long enough to become one of its youngest Global Vice Presidents, running the Business Analytics and Data Solutions division worldwide. That is a position most people spend a decade earning. He earned it faster. He worked in Germany and Dubai along the way, absorbing the patterns of enterprise software at global scale before most of his peers had left their first job.

Then he left to build something from scratch. In 2013, Kiran founded CLYP Technology, a mobile marketing automation platform. Fishbowl acquired it in 2015. He stayed on as Chief Product and Revenue Officer, then rose to Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer. That is how serial entrepreneurs work: they exit, and then they keep moving.

In 2018, Kiran founded Hypersonix. The premise was sharp: retailers were making pricing, promotion, and inventory decisions with dashboards and human judgment, at a moment when both were becoming the bottleneck. His answer was not better analytics. It was autonomous decision-making - AI that acts, not just reports.

Co-founder Rama Rao brought academic weight few startups can claim: former Chief Data Officer at Intuit and Kabbage, analytics lead at eBay and PayPal, and a stint teaching Data Science at MIT. Kiran had the operator instinct. Rao had the data science depth. The founding combination was deliberate.

The company's flagship product, ProfitGPT, is not a chatbot. It is a suite of five integrated AI agents - Pricing AI, Competitor AI, Promo AI, Inventory AI, and Forecasting AI - each one running continuously, making or recommending decisions without waiting for a human to ask. The system tracks competitors 24 hours a day. It adjusts prices in real time. It flags promotions that erode margin before the campaign launches. Hypersonix claims 10-12% margin lift within 90 days. That is not the kind of number you put in a press release if you cannot back it up.

By 2024, Hypersonix had raised $35 million in a Series B led by B Capital Group, with Intel Capital participating alongside angel investor Gokul Rajaram - one of the more sought-after names in retail and commerce technology. The round valued the company at $200 million. Total funding crossed $50 million.

The platform now optimizes more than 5 million SKUs across grocery, apparel, beauty, furniture, electronics, and sporting goods. Over 100 retail brands use it. The AI makes more than 100,000 pricing decisions per day - autonomously, without a pricing analyst reviewing each one.

The Forbes Technology Council does not send invitations to everyone who asks. Kiran was admitted to its ranks - an invitation-only group of CIOs, CTOs, and technology executives recognized as world-class in their fields. He has used that platform to write about the future of AI in retail, generative commerce, and the structural gaps between what personalization promises and what it actually delivers.

His thesis on personalization is worth sitting with: that retailers have more customer data than they know what to do with, and they are leaving the competitive advantage on the table by failing to operationalize it. ProfitGPT is his answer to that gap - not another dashboard, but a system that closes the loop between data and action without requiring a human analyst in between.

That is the through-line. From electrical engineering to SAP analytics to mobile marketing to agentic AI - Kiran has always been working on the same problem: how do you get large systems to make better decisions, faster, at scale? The product names and the industries have changed. The question has not.