The View from the Office.  

I met up with Ajay Krishna, founder and CEO of StreamOS, at Pave, a coffee shop in midtown. He had an iced coffee. I got so caught up in the conversation that I never ordered anything.  

StreamOS leverages AI to automate financial solutions for all businesses from small to enterprise. Among other things, the company provides real-time contract pricing, billing processing and accounts receivable management. AI agents handle customer communications.

Ajay started his career when he joined Citadel in 2011 after getting a Masters in computer science from Carnegie Mellon. He stayed five years, ultimately working in fixed income research in the systemic trading group. 

Working for Ken Griffin’s hedge fund was a formative experience. Citadel is a legendarily tough place. Ajay said the first week he was hired he stepped out for a break and came back to find half the team fired for underperformance. 

On the flip side, Ajay said he’s never been surrounded by a more brilliant group of colleagues. The kind of people who could do complex math in their head and scan long streams of data and find errors immediately. 

The management and leadership lessons Ajay took away: Citadel benefited from a strong culture, flat management structure, environment of “brutal honesty” and quick decision making. 

Ajay left Citadel to join M Science in 2017 and then Finicity, which was later acquired by Mastercard. He spent two years working on data analytics and small business solutions, running a team with a mandate to boost revenue as part of the acquisition earn out.  

There were some challenges that would inform his decision to launch his own company. He said the team struggled to get real-time updates on customer usage, pricing, and spending. It was time consuming to figure out pricing for large contracts. 

Ajay left to start his own firm in part because he thought his finance background from Citadel and MasterCard gave him deep domain knowledge and AI made his goal of trying to bring engineering and data to traditional business functions possible. 

He said he splits time between LA and New York City, where he values the competitive intensity. 

You can reach Ajay via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.