Profile / Founder & CEO
Saket
Saurabh
The man who helped render PlayStation 3 graphics is now rendering the future of enterprise data - one pipeline at a time.
Saket Saurabh — Nexla, San Mateo, California
The man who helped render PlayStation 3 graphics is now rendering the future of enterprise data - one pipeline at a time.
Saket Saurabh — Nexla, San Mateo, California
Saket Saurabh is not building another data tool. He is building the last data tool enterprises should need to build pipelines with. His company, Nexla, sits at the intersection of where generative AI broke everything and the frantic race to fix it - a platform that connects, transforms, and delivers data for AI applications without requiring an army of engineers.
Before Nexla, before the pitch decks and the Gartner magic quadrants, Saket was inside NVIDIA's labs working on GPU and software technology for something the world had never seen: the PlayStation 3. He was part of a small innovation team, which meant he was close enough to the hardware to understand how compute scales - a lesson that never left him.
He took an MBA at The Wharton School, not to escape engineering but to understand the machinery around it. Then he co-founded Mobsmith, a mobile ad-serving startup, as CTO. When Rubicon Project (NYSE: RUBI) acquired Mobsmith, Saket stayed on as Vice President of Mobile Product & Technology. He ran product, engineering, and adops for a publicly traded company. He saw what scale looked like from the inside of a listed entity, and he understood what broke under that weight.
In 2016, he founded Nexla. The insight was specific and uncomfortable: enterprises were drowning in data but the infrastructure to move it reliably didn't exist at the velocity the business demanded. Every team was rebuilding the same pipelines. Every data engineer was fighting the same fires. Nexla was built to end that loop.
The bet paid off. DoorDash, Johnson & Johnson, American Express, Poshmark, and Instacart are among Nexla's enterprise customers. Nexla was named a 2021 Gartner Cool Vendor in Data Management and appeared in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Integration two years in a row. In 2023, the company raised an $18M round, bringing total funding to $33.5M from investors including Blumberg Capital, Industry Ventures, Shield Capital, and Liberty Global Ventures.
Nexla's architecture introduced the concept of "Nexsets" - virtual data products that abstract the complexity of data pipelines for downstream consumers. In late 2025, Nexla launched "Express," a conversational AI platform that lets teams describe what they need in plain language and get working data workflows out the other end. The goal, in Saket's words: make data integration as simple as calling a Stripe or Twilio API.
"Our vision is for integrating and manipulating data in applications to be as straightforward as using APIs from providers like Stripe or Twilio."
- Saket Saurabh, Nexla
"Agentic AI - agents that automate tasks without people being involved - is definitely a growing trend as we move into 2025."
- Saket Saurabh, Unite.AI Interview, January 2025
2021 Gartner Cool Vendor in Data Management - recognizing Nexla's Data Fabric architecture as one of the most innovative in the category.
Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Integration - included two consecutive years as an honorable mention.
Raised $33.5M in venture funding from Blumberg Capital, Industry Ventures, Shield Capital, Liberty Global Ventures, and others.
Mobsmith exit - co-founded and led CTO at Mobsmith, mobile ad-serving company acquired by NYSE-listed Rubicon Project.
Contributed to GPU software technology at NVIDIA for the PlayStation 3 - one of the most technically complex consumer products of its era.
TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield launch - one of Silicon Valley's most competitive and watched founder stages.
Enterprise clients including DoorDash, Johnson & Johnson, American Express, Poshmark, and Instacart.
Degrees from two of the world's most selective institutions: IIT Kanpur (BTech CS) and The Wharton School (MBA Finance).
"Agentic AI - agents that automate tasks without people being involved - is definitely a growing trend as we move into 2025."
"Our vision is to simplify data work further, so that integrating and manipulating data in applications is as straightforward as using APIs from providers like Stripe or Twilio."
"We're building the integration platform that is built with AI, for AI."
"Nexla enables data engineering automation through Nexsets - data products that make it easy to integrate, transform, deliver, and monitor data."
Those who have worked closely with Saket describe a rare combination rarely found in one person.
His first job was at NVIDIA, where his small team shipped GPU technology that ended up inside the PlayStation 3 - hardware millions of people played but few knew who built.
Saket holds degrees from IIT Kanpur and The Wharton School - two institutions with acceptance rates that make most elite colleges look easy.
Before data infrastructure was fashionable, Saket was building mobile ad-serving technology with Mobsmith - a domain that barely existed when he started.
Nexla's concept of "Nexsets" - virtual data products - abstracts away the complexity of pipelines so data consumers never need to know what's under the hood.
Saket has spoken at FIMA US and CDOIQ Symposium - financial data and chief data officer conferences where most presenters run much larger organizations.