Why I Joined DataPelago: John “JG” Chirapurath, President

Throughout my career leading transformations at companies like SAP, Microsoft, and others, I've learned that timing is everything in enterprise technology. You can have the best product, the smartest team, and the strongest market demand—but if you're early or late to the inflection point, none of it matters.

That's why when Rajan reached out about joining DataPelago as President, I knew within minutes that this was the moment I'd been waiting for.

The AI infrastructure paradox

Here's what I've observed working with enterprise customers across the Data + AI landscape: everyone wants to be AI-first, but most are still data-last. Companies are pouring billions into foundation models, AI applications, and analytics talent, yet they're hitting the same fundamental bottleneck—their data infrastructure simply wasn't built for the AI era.

The secret of the AI revolution is that the race is won or lost in the first mile—not the last. While everyone focuses on model sophistication and deployment strategies, the real competitive advantage lies in how quickly and cost-effectively you can process the massive, unstructured datasets that fuel AI and analytics applications.

I've watched countless AI and analytics initiatives stall not because of algorithmic complexity, but because of data processing economics. Teams spend months trying to make their existing infrastructure handle these workloads, only to discover that the cost and time required make their business cases impossible.

Why DataPelago changes everything

What drew me to DataPelago was what Rajan and the team have built - a fundamental reimagining of data processing economics for the AI era.

The numbers speak for themselves: 10x faster performance with 80% cost reduction. But beyond the metrics, what excites me is the transformation potential. When DataPelago’s customers can process petabytes daily with blazing speed, or when they can deploy AI-powered analytics in hours instead of months—that's not optimization, that's revolution.

From my experience scaling data + AI platforms at companies serving hundreds of millions of users, I know how rare it is to find technology that delivers both breakthrough performance and seamless integration. DataPelago's approach—leveraging the same hardware-software co-design principles that powered the internet's transformation—represents the kind of non-linear thinking that creates new market categories.

The convergence

I'm joining DataPelago because we're transforming enterprise AI and analytics infrastructure. Three converging trends create unprecedented opportunity:

First, the explosion of unstructured data has fundamentally shifted the compute requirements for enterprise AI and analytics. Traditional data processing approaches simply can't handle the massive scale and speed that these workloads demand.

Second, the maturation of open-source engines like Spark, combined with lakehouse architectures, has created the foundation for vendor-agnostic AI and analytics infrastructure. Companies can now choose best-of-breed solutions without lock-in.

Third, the emergence of domain-specific accelerators has made orders-of-magnitude performance improvements achievable—but only if you architect the software stack specifically for acceleration.

DataPelago sits at the intersection of all three trends, with technology that transforms data processing economics while preserving infrastructure investments and eliminating vendor lock-in.

This is the moment

I've had the privilege of working with some of the most innovative companies in enterprise technology. What I've learned is that the most rewarding opportunities come when you can see around the corner—when you recognize a fundamental shift before it becomes obvious to everyone else.

DataPelago represents that moment. We're not just a company with great technology; we're positioned at the center of the infrastructure transformation that will define the next decade for Data + AI.

The first mile decides everything. And I'm here to help ensure DataPelago wins it.