finance-ai
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Pat Oldenburg Wants Marketing to Stop Counting Strangers
After two decades in enterprise software, AppZen's CMO has a blunt diagnosis for vanity metrics: an enterprise deal is one account, however many people click. His career is a study in turning marketing from a tally counter into a team sport.
Anant Kale Put AI on Expense Duty. Then the Receipts Got Weird.
Anant Kale built AppZen around an unfashionable question: who checks the paperwork after software makes it easy to submit? Fourteen years later, that question sits at the center of the argument over AI, judgment and the future of finance work.
Rajeev Pathak
Rajeev Pathak is the co-founder and CEO of Hyperbots Inc., a Dover, Delaware-based startup building agentic AI co-pilots for corporate finance and accounting. Hyperbots raised a $6.5M Series A in May 2025 co-led by Arkam Ventures and Athera Venture Partners, bringing total funding to $8.5M+. Pathak previously founded funtoot, an education AI company acquired by Embibe in 2019, where he then served as SVP. Before that, he spent over a decade at Wipro running a $100M+ technology business and began his career as a satellite engineer at ISRO working on the INSAT program. He holds a PGSM from IIM Bangalore.
Gopalakrishna Kuppuswamy
Gopalakrishna Kuppuswamy is Co-Founder and CTO of Cognida.ai, an enterprise AI company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, that raised a $15M Series A from Nexus Venture Partners in February 2025. With 30+ years in technology - starting at CMC Limited in 1994 and spending a decade as VP at Hitachi Vantara - he now leads the engineering behind Zunō, Cognida's agentic AI platform that cuts enterprise AI deployment timelines from 6-8 months down to 10-12 weeks. Based in Hyderabad, he holds master's degrees from both the University of Hyderabad and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and has helped grow Cognida.ai to 250+ employees and $37.7M ARR.