Founder and chief executive of Cyferd, the New York-headquartered platform trying to convince the NHS, a Midlands university, and a basketball team that they all need the same data model.
Ranjit Bahia runs a company whose customers include the UK's National Health Service and the Leicester Riders basketball team, which is either a strange sentence or a very useful demo, depending on how much time you have spent listening to enterprise software pitches. The company is called Cyferd, it lives at 1177 Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, it has around forty-one employees, and its central technical claim - the thing every slide deck circles back to - is that all the data lives in one place, under one model, with an AI engine on top called Neural Genesis. The name is dramatic. Bahia does not appear to mind.
Cyferd was founded in 2021. Bahia has been building software companies long enough to have opinions about what to name an AI engine, and long enough to have exited one. Before Cyferd, he was chief executive of RoxAI, an alerting and workflow automation startup that used AI to detect meaningful patterns in enterprise data. In January 2020, Qlik bought it. Bahia stayed on for exactly a year as Senior Director of Strategic Business Development, then left to start Cyferd - a sequence that reads, in retrospect, like a founder using a large corporate as extended field research.
The problem Cyferd points at is old and well-documented and expensive. Most enterprises run somewhere between dozens and hundreds of separate applications - one for finance, one for HR, three for CRM, several nobody remembers signing the renewal on - and each of them owns a piece of the same underlying data. This is the reason "digital transformation" became a phrase serious people used without embarrassment: it turned out that transformation, in practice, mostly meant integration, and integration was mostly duct tape.
Cyferd's argument is that if you started over, you would not build it this way. You would build one platform, with one data model, and let both professional and citizen developers build code-free applications on top of it. Then you would put an AI engine underneath - Neural Genesis, in this case - so that the workflows and predictions and alerts all draw on the same substrate. That is the pitch. The pitch is not new. What is interesting is that Bahia is trying to make it real across six specific verticals at once.
The six are procurement, legal, housing, healthcare, higher education, and sports management. Cyferd sells AI for legal contract management and RFP automation, for university administration and student success, for patient demand forecasting, for housing community engagement, for sports performance analytics and league management. This is a lot of surface area for a company of forty-one people. It also happens to be a coherent list if you take Cyferd's premise seriously: they are all workflow-heavy, data-fragmented, public-service-adjacent domains where the incumbents built for the last decade of software.
As data is democratized, users want to not only understand data, but use it in real-time to manage their business by exception and automate business workflows.— Ranjit Bahia, on the Qlik acquisition of RoxAI, January 2020
The RoxAI-to-Qlik-to-Cyferd sequence is the important part of Bahia's biography, because it explains what Cyferd is a reaction to. RoxAI built a product called Ping - AI-driven alerts sitting on top of business intelligence tools. It analyzed data stores for emergent patterns and suggested alert parameters automatically. It was the kind of point solution that gets acquired by a bigger BI vendor, and in January 2020, it was.
Inside Qlik, Bahia would have seen up close the constraints of adding AI to a tool that was not built for it - a large, capable, and profoundly BI-shaped organization asking a small AI team to plug in. The obvious lesson: bolt-on AI has a ceiling. The less-obvious lesson: the ceiling is set by the underlying data model, not by the model quality. This is essentially the thesis Cyferd was founded on twelve months later.
Cyferd is headquartered in New York but its most-referenced customers are in Britain, which is not usually how transatlantic enterprise software works. The company also has meaningful operations abroad; public materials describe a global organization with staff spread across multiple countries. The New York address is a Sixth Avenue office in the low 40s; the phone number on the company profile is a UK number.
Bahia leads a senior team that includes Anne-Louise Bee as chief operating officer, Richard Byard as chief product and technical officer, Haider Al-Seaidy as chief customer officer, Matt Heys as SVP of healthcare, and Baljit Virdee as SVP of sales. It is, in structure, an enterprise software company: a product and technology core, a healthcare vertical lead, a sales function, a customer function. The interesting choice is having a named healthcare SVP at fewer than fifty employees.
The tech stack, per public data, is what you would expect of a company that takes the operator role seriously: Kubernetes on Google Cloud and Amazon EKS, Docker, Jenkins and GitHub Actions for delivery, Elasticsearch and Kibana and Grafana for observability, Wazuh for security, Node.js and React for the surface area. Microsoft 365 and Azure hosting. Slack, HubSpot, SalesLoft, Atlassian Cloud for the rest. Nothing exotic. Everything defensible.
Founder and CEO of Cyferd, an AI-led digital transformation platform headquartered in New York.
He was CEO of RoxAI, which Qlik acquired in January 2020. He then spent a year at Qlik as Senior Director of Strategic Business Development before founding Cyferd in 2021.
Neural Genesis. It powers workflow automation and app-building on top of Cyferd's unified data model.
Six of them: healthcare, higher education, housing, procurement, legal, and sports management.
Approximately $14.8M in total funding, with a Series A round closed in January 2024.