HumanTronik, an artificial intelligence startup co-founded by Monish Darda, has acquired CloudMoyo, the Bellevue tech services firm that Darda helped spin out of Icertis in 2015. The deal keeps two of CloudMoyo’s co-founders in charge: Darda, as CEO of its new parent company, and Manish Kedia, who continues to run CloudMoyo day to day.
The family of the late Samir Bodas, CloudMoyo’s other co-founder and the longtime CEO of Icertis, sold its stake in CloudMoyo as part of the transaction, Kedia said. Darda co-founded HumanTronik earlier this year with Kabir Narang, a Singapore-based investor and early Icertis backer.
Business Model
HumanTronik is developing what it calls “human language models,” its phrase for AI that learns how specific executives make decisions and work with others. Those models power AI agents inside Microsoft Outlook, Teams, and other workplace software. Kedia calls the approach “Service as Software,” explaining that customers pay for software with ongoing support from CloudMoyo built into the subscription. Pricing is shifting from per-user fees toward fees based on results.
Industry Trends
Sequoia Capital’s Julien Bek argued in a March essay that the next $1 trillion company will be “a software company masquerading as a services firm,” noting that companies spend $6 on services for every $1 on software. Anthropic formed a $1.5 billion services venture in May with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs, aimed at midsize businesses. OpenAI launched its Deployment Company the same month with more than $4 billion in initial investment, embedding its engineers inside businesses.
CloudMoyo has more than 300 consultants. Over the past two years, its work has expanded from mostly implementing Icertis contract software to building AI tools on Microsoft’s Fabric data platform, for customers including Seattle-based Expeditors and Mexican railroad Ferromex. That AI business is growing at about 100%, outpacing the company’s more traditional work, Kedia said.
Acquisition and Future Plans
The acquisition moved quickly, Kedia said. He and Darda met in the Bay Area three to four months ago to talk about CloudMoyo’s AI work, and Darda showed him what HumanTronik was building. Negotiations took about two months. Because Darda was a major shareholder in both companies and on the CloudMoyo board, he was not directly involved in the negotiations, according to Kedia, who noted that each side had its own legal counsel.
CloudMoyo will keep its name and existing customer contracts, and will sell and implement HumanTronik’s technology in addition to its existing lines of business. Nearly all of CloudMoyo’s employees are becoming HumanTronik employees, joining a few HumanTronik engineering leaders in the Bay Area, Kedia said. The combined company has about 20 people in the Seattle area, where CloudMoyo has had an office in Bellevue for the past decade. Kedia said the company plans to hire engineering, product, and sales staff here.
HumanTronik is headquartered in San Francisco, where it plans to open an engineering center. Darda is based in Pune, India, where CloudMoyo has an engineering center, and HumanTronik is setting up a subsidiary in Singapore.
Notably, Darda co-founded Icertis with Samir Bodas in 2009 and served as its CTO for about 17 years before stepping back in April to start HumanTronik. His title at Icertis is now chief mentor. Kedia, who at one point led business development for Microsoft’s SQL Server database software, was president of Icertis for several months before leading the CloudMoyo spinout.
Icertis has no financial stake in HumanTronik or CloudMoyo, Kedia said, though the companies continue to work together. The enterprise has been led by interim co-CEOs Rajat Bahri and Jim Moffatt since Anand Subbaraman departed in July, less than a year after succeeding Bodas. Narang, who led Icertis’s Series A funding round in 2015 while at Fidelity’s venture arm, Eight Roads, later became a founding partner at B Capital.