Portrait No. 001
Hema Raghavan
Co-Founder and Head of Engieneering
Kumo
Kumo is an AI model company that provides a platform for anyone to train and run state-of-the-art AI models on their relational data. Models built on Kumo already power the recommendations, fraud detection, risk scoring, entity resolution, RAG, and other mission-critical components inside applications used by hundreds of millions of people globally. The company is led by pioneers in Relational Deep Learning and Graph Transformers with the mission of helping AI teams make their most important data also their most useful data.
Chapter I
The toughest challenges you've faced as a founder.
At Kumo, I’m a co-founder and lead the engineering team. The biggest challenge has been balancing long-term vision with near-term execution. We’re building something foundational — predictive AI on enterprise relational data — and it’s easy to get pulled toward short-term wins. My constant focus is keeping the team aligned on our larger mission while moving fast enough to demonstrate product-market fit. Doing this as we scale makes it even more complex: we’re not just shipping software, we’re building a culture. Maintaining a sense of ownership, technical excellence, and collaboration while ensuring every new hire feels the same purpose and urgency that existed on day one is an ongoing, energizing challenge. It’s about scaling not only systems but conviction. Outside of Kumo, I’m a mother to two wonderful children and a partner to an incredible teammate — my biggest cheerleaders. These roles deeply shape how I lead: with empathy, grit, and perspective. What keeps me grounded is when my daughter writes in her school essays that I’m her role model for entrepreneurship and work ethic. That reminder — that the impact extends beyond the company — is my True North.
Chapter II
Your vision.
At Kumo.ai, we’re obsessed with solving one problem: enterprises have years of relational data — orders, users, transactions, products — but can’t easily extract predictive insight from it. Every company asks, “What will happen next?”, yet their data infrastructure only tells them what happened before. Our vision is to change that by building the foundation model for relational data — a model that learns from the structure, semantics, and dynamics of enterprise data itself. Just as language models transformed how we interact with text, Kumo’s relational foundation model will transform how organizations reason about their business. We imagine a world where predictive intelligence is as accessible as querying a database — where every decision, from supply chain to customer retention, can be data-driven, accurate, and explainable. That’s the change we’re enabling: making prediction a native capability of every enterprise. That is the change I am driving, AI that truly works for everyone.
Chapter III
The impact you want to leave behind — for your industry, your community, and the women who come next.
I want to show that women can lead in deep tech while raising families and building meaningful companies. If my journey helps even one woman believe she can do both, that will be my proudest legacy. For the industry, I want to leave behind a standard where AI is practical, ethical, and accessible to everyone. For my community, I hope to inspire a culture of learning, courage, and collaboration, where challenges are seen not as roadblocks, but as opportunities to grow!