Series · 7 parts
Company-Building Under Real Constraints
Concrete decisions from operational software companies — customer concentration, automation readiness, exception handling, services, enterprise risk, and what exits do and don't teach.
Founder and CEO of Routespring · Co-founder and advisor to Up Robotics
I build systems that have to work in the real world.
Software for operationally complex industries — payments, healthcare, and now travel — the exception-heavy workflows and fragmented coordination that most software quietly gives up on.
Mid-project. As always.
Pine Labs — payments GlobalLogic — engineering hCentive — healthcare Routespring — travel
Building now
Routespring
Founder and CEO · 2020–present
Software for corporate travel and airline crew operations — booking, payments, hotel operations, disruption handling and reconciliation. The current focus is using AI to automate the exception-heavy operational work that has always fallen back to phone calls and manual coordination: agents that call hotels, rebooking that resolves disruptions in minutes, software that does the services work itself.
Visit Routespring →Selected writing
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Pivot gates
How founders can distinguish a slow strategy from a broken premise before sunk cost makes the decision for them.
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Routing optimization isn't a shortest-path problem
The hard part of flight routing was never finding the cheapest itinerary. It's that 'cheapest' and 'best' are different questions, and one of them is a hard rule while the other is a matter of taste.
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The first question in any outage: whose system is it?
Most production failures in integrated systems aren't yours or theirs. They're the handoff between the two, and that's exactly where nobody looks first.
Career, in order
1998
Pine Labs
Co-founder and CTO (1998–2000). Card-based payment technology for Indian retailers.
2000
GlobalLogic
Co-founder and Head of Engineering (2000–2009). Built the early engineering organization as it became a global product-development company.
2009
hCentive
Co-founder and CTO (2009–2020). Healthcare eligibility, enrollment and exchange technology; later acquired by Optum.
2020
Routespring
Founder and CEO (2020–present). Software and AI for corporate and airline crew travel.
Selected projects
Policy-aware flight search
PrototypeAn MCP server that searches Google Flights, evaluates each option against a corporate travel policy, and ranks compliant results by traveler preference — an agent-native travel experience that keeps explicit policy and payment boundaries.
AI pillbox monitor
Student projectA Raspberry Pi and on-device computer-vision system, built with an Up Robotics student, that reads which of 21 pillbox cells still hold medication across seven days and three daily periods.
Co-founder and advisor
Up Robotics
A hands-on robotics and engineering program for young students. Not my day-to-day work — I help with strategy, technology and the occasional problem that needs more adults than children.
About Up Robotics →Off Duty
Away from the company: coaching robotics, over-built home infrastructure, and ranked lists of the films and shows I actually think about afterward.
See off-duty →Get in touch
Airline, travel or operational-software conversations; founder and company-building discussions; Up Robotics and student projects — the contact page routes it. Or subscribe to The Manifest for new writing.