Sarang
Jagdale

The Algorithm Behind the Algorithm

Start with the specifics. Sarang Jagdale spent his first professional years on the floor of Bajaj Auto - not in a boardroom, not at a whiteboard, but embedded in the operational reality of one of India's largest manufacturers. The machines, the schedules, the shortages. He understood supply chain as a physical problem before he ever framed it as a computational one.

Then came the pivot. Back to school - the hard way. A Fellow Programme in Management at Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, specializing in Production and Operations Management. Six years. A PhD that treated supply chain not as logistics trivia but as a genuine domain of decision science, where probability distributions meet purchase orders and optimization algorithms brush against real-world chaos.

IBM hired him. Then kept him for over a decade. He climbed from Consultant to Senior Managing Consultant, working across industries - industrial, automotive, hi-tech, consumer products, transportation. Fortune 500 problems. The kind of supply chains where a 2% efficiency gain translates to nine-figure savings. He was the person enterprise teams called when the spreadsheets stopped working and they needed someone who could actually model the uncertainty.

When Opex Analytics came calling, he moved again - this time to lead India operations for a company that was already doing things the consultants only talked about: using AI and machine learning at scale in real supply chain deployments. That work caught the attention of the industry's consolidators. LLamasoft acquired Opex. Jagdale went from Principal to Regional Vice President overnight. Then Coupa Software absorbed LLamasoft, and he carried that same regional leadership role into a publicly traded company.

That line captures the frustration the entire founding team had been accumulating across those years. Jagdale, Ramakrishna, and the others - Ronan O'Donovan on product, Vish Oza on machine learning, Karthik Mutukrishnan on engineering, Sara Hoormann on strategy - had spent careers watching enterprises buy expensive software and then bend their operations to fit it. They knew a different architecture was possible. In 2021, they stopped consulting about it and built it.

Lyric launched from stealth with a clear thesis: supply chain decision-making should be composable, algorithmic, and owned by the organizations running it - not locked inside a vendor's black box. Jagdale's domain is algorithms. He's the one translating decades of operations research into production-grade, enterprise-deployable decision intelligence.

The results are not subtle. In 18 months post-stealth, Lyric hit 500% revenue growth. The client roster reads like a global trade atlas: Coca-Cola, Google, Mondelez International, Kuehne+Nagel. In August 2025, Insight Partners led a $43.5M Series B, bringing total funding to $67 million. Mondelez's supply chain lead put it simply: "Their algorithmic horsepower is exceptional."

Jagdale's arc is an unusual one in the startup world. He is not a twenty-something who dreamed up a pitch deck. He is a practitioner who came up through every layer of the problem before deciding to rebuild the foundation. The PhD who worked the factory floor. The consultant who got his hands dirty with Fortune 500 deployments. The operator who saw acquisition and integration from the inside. And now: the co-founder building the platform his former clients wish had existed ten years ago.