Gnani Palanikumar

Gnani Palanikumar has over 25 years of experience in the technology industry. Gnani began their career in 1992 as a Technical Lead at Reach Software, where they designed and developed the first-generation workflow tools. In 1995, they moved to BancTec (Plexus Software) as a Development Manager, leading the product development team of Plexus software client products. In 2000, Gnani took on the role of Program Management Director at Selectica (now Determine), where they were a founding member of the Selectica Health Insurance Application suite and developed and launched Quoting, Rating, and Analysis 1. In 2004, they joined Apigee (acquired by Google) as Director of Product Management, helping to raise money in Seed and $12M Series A rounds and leading the initial product strategy and definition of the highly scalable engineered systems to manage cloud API. In 2006, Gnani moved to Agile Software (acquired by Oracle) as Group Product Manager, providing leadership to cross-functional platform and integration teams and managing technical partnerships with software and hardware vendors to deliver a high performance and scalable platform. In 2007, they joined Oracle Corporation as Product Management Director for Product Life Cycle Management (PLM) and Oracle Fusion Supply Chain Management (SCM) cloud applications. Gnani also led innovation that tied trending technologies such as IoT, Bots, Mobile, and Cloud API to supply chain use cases. In 2017, Gnani became a CEO Coach and Mentor for multiple accelerators. In 2018, they took on roles as Partner at Alchemist Accelerator and Executive at IIT Startups, in addition to their role as Managing Director of the Founders Practice at CEO Quest, where they coach early-stage startup CEOs on business and funding strategies.

Gnani Palanikumar received a MS in Computer Science and a MS in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.