Soum Paul

Soum Paul

2x Founder, Technologist and Author | 18+ Years Experience in Cloud, AI and SaaS Products

Contact: soum.paul@gmail.com | +91-9769233295 | LinkedIn

Objective

High-velocity, product-driven technologist and 2x founder with 18+ years of experience building and scaling AI-native cloud platforms. Proven track record leading engineering, product, AI, and growth teams across London, Delhi, Bangalore, and Pune. Delivered successful launches in Cloud Telephony, AI-powered ESG/GHG reporting, FinTech, EdTech, and Agentic AI. Deep expertise in search technologies, agentic AI, LLM-powered workflows, vision AI, audio AI, ASR, Text-to-Speech and multimodal AI workflows. Extensive experience building teams, launching venture scale products, LLM-SEO, growth marketing and driving revenue growth using technology-first approach.

Experience

Co-Founder & CTO, Superteams.ai

April 2022 – Present | Delaware, US & Delhi, India

Launched Superteams.ai, and built a profitable and growing R&D-focussed AI-consulting firm.

  • Built TryThat.ai, a sovereign agentic AI system in the real estate domain built using an ensemble of open source LLMs/LRMs, vector search, and SQL, and works on 100Mn+ rows of transaction data.
  • Architected the AI stack for Bevolve.ai, with automated invoice parsing (OCR), scope 1-2-3 categorisation, and AI-powered ESG report generation.
  • Launched NextNeural, a platform for launching sovereign AI agents for enterprises. Leverages open-source reasoning models, vector search, SQL and knowledge graphs.
  • Built NeuraSearch, a Rust-based open source search engine for AI search that uses TF-IDF and GraphBLAS-powered graph algorithms for fast, lightweight, in-memory retrieval.

Founder & CEO, Spark.Live / Home Screen Network

August 2017 – January 2022 | Bengaluru, India

Founded Home Screen Network, raised $2.2Mn and scaled the platform to $1Mn+ ARR/1.5Mn+ downloads.

  • Built India’s first vernacular live video & edtech platform (Spark.Live); scaled to $1M+ ARR and 1.5 Mn+ app downloads.
  • Raised $2.2M from Saama Capital, a US-based VC. Managed fundraise, investor relations, hired 50+ team spread across Mumbai, Bengaluru and Chennai.
  • Formed partnerships with SonyLIV, JioTV, Sharechat, and Dailyhunt; generated 70M+ monthly views.
  • Designed video recommendation systems, and scaled to 10K+ concurrent streaming sessions.

Technology and Product Consultant - Swadhaar FinAccess, MFIN India, Welthungerhilfe

February 2016 – August 2017 | Mumbai, India

Architected award-winning fintech and digital literacy platforms for microfinance institutions and NGOs.

  • Led the development of the Swadhaar Saathi app (won the MetLife Inclusion Award).
  • Led the development of Swadhaar Dost, an app that assisted MFI field agents in loan origination, credit verification, KYC, and collections from SME borrowers across 5000+ Indian pincodes.
  • Led the development and launch of MFIN Financial Literacy app, and produced 15+ animated videos in 5+ languages to explain financial literacy concepts to users.

Head of Special Projects & Acting CTO, Knowlarity Communications (acquired by Gupshup)

October 2013 – March 2016 | Bengaluru, India

Led key technology and product initiatives at India’s leading cloud telephony platform powering Swiggy, Zomato, and thousands of SMEs.

  • Interim CTO for 6 months, overseeing technology teams and strategic architecture transitions. Assisted the CEO during the transition phase and created fundraising collateral.
  • Co-led the development of high-availability telephony backend using Asterisk and WebRTC, to enable virtual numbers, IVR, real-time SIP call handling, dynamic call routing, and browser-based call-center dashboard with 99.99% uptime and support for thousands of concurrent sessions.
  • Brought zero-downtime deployment cadence, CI/CD, and Agile product development processes using Docker, ansible. Created 99.99% uptime reliability on the telephony backend.
  • Drove the design and development of Knowlarity’s self-serve platform, working with the design team to create a customer-centric UX.
  • Scaled the R&D, DevOps, and engineering teams. Assisted in building the Bengaluru technology team and helped hire 100+ engineers during the scale-up phase after Series A & B.

Architecture Consultant, E2E Networks

2012 - 2013 | Delhi, India

Helped create the architecture of India’s leading AI-first sovereign cloud platform (now NSE-listed).

  • Customized OpenNebula to build E2E Cloud’s public cloud and IaaS management platform, with DRBD, live replication, snapshotting and hot failover.
  • Led orchestration for the launch of E2E Cloud’s PostgreSQL-powered DBaaS system that supported clustering, sharding and replication.
  • Assisted CTO in hiring an engineering team and created engineering cadence and agile development processes to streamline platform development and launch.

Advisor, Syria Deeply & News Deeply

2012 – 2013 | London, UK (Remote)

Advised on technology, product design, and launch strategy for NewsDeeply, a single-topic crisis journalism platform focused on the Syrian conflict.

  • Advised the product design, technology roadmap, and launch of Syria Deeply, a single-topic journalism platform.
  • Helped with the ideation and design of the company’s proprietary timeline and geography driven news drilldowns.
  • Assisted in streamlining the configuration, deployment, and launch of multiple journalism platforms under NewsDeeply (built using Ruby on Rails, custom JS).
  • Helped hire the remote-first engineering team and set up agile processes for development of News Deeply platform.

Head of Technology & Founding Engineer, State.com

October 2008 – June 2012 | London, UK

Architected and launched State.com, an AI-powered opinion analysis platform leveraging NLP, semantic web, and large-scale graph data.

  • Co-led the IP development and filing of State.com EU patent “System and method for managing opinion networks with interactive opinion flows”.
  • Architected and developed a structured opinion platform that used WordNet database and Bag-of-Words technique for opinion word detection, and DBPedia-powered topic disambiguation.
  • Leveraged Stanford NLP and NLTK for structured opinion mining from user tweets and comments.
  • Developed the core architecture with Ruby on Rails and Sinatra backend, and led the development of State’s browser extensions, frontend and analytics platform.
  • Played an instrumental role in the $14 Mn fundraising, investor roadshows, and managing investor relations, directly collaborating with the advisory board.
  • Led the hiring of the engineering team, growing from first engineer to a team of 35. Assisted the founders hiring of senior leadership.

Senior Architect & Founding Member, Mixercast Inc. (acquired)

2006 – 2008 | San Francisco, USA & Pune, India

Architected one of the first user-generated video platforms, enabling media clients like Time Warner, CNBC, CNN-IBN, Zee TV, and Star TV to engage audiences with remixable content.

  • Built a 16-person engineering team in Pune via acquihire of an Adobe Flash/Flex services company.
  • Led product design, platform architecture, and backend development, and launched the UGC video platform Mixercast in 6 months.
  • Managed on-prem deployments, backup/recovery, and migration of 5M+ users and content from a competitor acquisition.
  • Assisted the CEO in business development and sales pitches to Time Warner, CNBC, CNN-IBN, Zee TV, Star TV, and other media houses.

Software Engineer, Electronics for Imaging (EFI)

August 2000 – June 2003 | Foster City, CA, USA

  • Designed memory management modules for embedded Linux and VxWorks platforms.
  • Optimized and integrated core EFI kernel and software modules, focusing on high-performance embedded Linux printer servers.
  • Key integration and delivery team member for EFI's advanced 4000 ppm high-speed color printers and servers.

Education

  • Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur - B.Tech., Computer Science & Engineering (1996 – 2000)
  • University of Zurich, Switzerland - Research Assistant, AI (2000)
  • EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland - Internship, Computer Science (1999)

Authorship

  • Surviving the AI Future: A Guide to Thriving in a World of Intelligent Machines Expected Publication Date: March, 2026
  • Flight Of The Unicorns: Lessons From India's Startup Bubble Publisher: HarperCollins India (Harper Business), Year: 2017
  • The Topper Prepares: True Stories of Those Who Cracked the JEE Publisher: HarperCollins India, Year: 2015
  • Indian Mass Media and the Politics of Change Publisher: Routledge India, Year: 2011

Patent & Publication

  • System and Method for Managing Opinion Networks with Interactive Opinion Flows Patent Number: EP2745210A1
  • Virtual Kathakali: Gesture Driven Metamorphosis Authors: Soumyadeep Paul, Sudipta N. Sinha, Amitabha Mukerjee Proceedings of International Conference on Knowledge Based Computer Systems, Mumbai, India

Impact Documentaries

  • Produced "Including the Excluded," a documentary highlighting microfinance and financial inclusion in India, sponsored by MFIN.
  • Produced and directed grassroots micro-entrepreneurship film for Welthungerhilfe, in partnership with 5 NGOs.
  • Produced and directed films for PETA India, Current.tv, IBM, WIPRO, Ogilvy PR.

Causes

Climate Chain, Sustainability, Animal Rights, Disaster and Humanitarian Relief, Education, Poverty Alleviation

DevScript

// DevScript: A simple example
console.log('Hello, World from Soum Paul!');
function greet(name) {
  return `Welcome, ${name}!`;
}
greet('Developer');