Rubrik co-founder reappears at AI analytics biz

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An unnamed AI-enabled data analytics startup has surfaced with a Rubrik co-founder as its CEO along with two other Rubrik alumni.

Soham Mazumdar co-founded data protection-focused Rubrik in 2014 along with CEO Bipul Sinha, VP Engineering Arvind Jain, and CTO Arvind Nithrakashyap. Rubrik has since grown enormously, notching up 2,000-plus customers, $550 million in funding, and half a billion in annual recurring revenue.

In a LinkedIn post, Mazumdar says he is: “Excited to share that I have embarked on a new startup journey with incredible partners in crime, Sharvanath Pathak and Kapil Chhabra. We are taking on some critical problems at the intersection of AI and Data Analytics. Currently heads down building the product and hope to share updates before long.”

Mazumdar’s post adds: ”We are looking for founding engineers to join us on this journey! We are hiring across the stack, frontend, backend & NLP. Please hit us up if you are interested in learning more.”

Rubrik alumni Soham Mazumdar, Sharvanath Pathak and Kapil Chhabra
From left: Soham Mazumdar, Sharvanath Pathak and Kapil Chhabra

Rubrik’s former engineering boss Arvind Jain left in 2019 to start up Glean as its CEO. Glean’s business is to provide AI-powered workplace search. Its software is using generative AI to build a virtual knowledge base that is aware of and works with an organization’s data governance environment.

It is a small world. Pathak is also an ex-founding engineer at Jain’s Glean and one-time founding engineer at Rubrik, from August 2014 to December 2016. Chhabra was ex-Senior Director of Product Management at Rubrik. He left in May this year.

The intersection of AI and data analytics is a booming area of development with large language model (LLM) machine learning being applied as an intelligent interface to dataset analysis routines. Databricks and its Dolly LLM chatbot is an obvious example of the ongoing supercharged developments.

The Dolly developers say that any organization using Dolly “can create, own, and customize powerful LLMs that can talk to people, without paying for API access or sharing data with third parties.”

We suspect Mazumdar’s startup will be active in the generative AI dataset analytics space and will endeavor to do more than Glean-type search, including something different from providing a framework for chatbots to organize analytic runs on and across datasets.