Entrepreneur and INI Alum Karthik Suresh Sells Two Artificial Intelligence Startups

M.S. in Information Networking (MSIN) alum Karthik Suresh has been busy. Last year, his startup Ignition had raised $8 million in funding, and now, that company and another of his startups, DoubleO.ai, have been sold, this one to ZoomInfo. Currently, Suresh is a Senior Product Director at ZoomInfo, working to incorporate Artificial Intelligence (AI) into their products. 

Suresh entered the MSIN in 2006 and took advantage of the interdisciplinary nature of the Information Networking Institute (INI) curriculum by taking courses in the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Tepper School of Business and Heinz College. Following his graduation, he went to Wall Street to work in the finance sector and then continued his education at business school. He wound his way to a startup company, helping to grow it into a major success. 

It was after a brief “vacation” from the startup space that Suresh went on to found his Ignition, a platform designed to bridge the gap between product development and marketing. Noticing the growing development in the AI and Large Language Model (LLM) space. “It became clear that if that’s what the future looks like, there’s no point in building a Software as a Service (SaaS) tool,” said Suresh.  “We had voice-of-customer agents, go-to-market agents and battle-card agents in Ignition. So, we then took that backend agent tech platform from Ignition [and] spun it out as a new brand called DoubleO.ai.” 

DoubleO.ai acts like a secret agent behind the scenes to help users complete their tasks by creating automated workflows. “Your workflow could be to set up a meeting with someone, and after the meeting, to download the transcript, extract all the talking points and then compile it into a report and email it to me,” explained Suresh. “That’s a series of tasks that most people do manually, but you could put an AI agent on it, which then goes through these tasks and then does the work for you.” 

Suresh’s passion for entrepreneurship began with his experience working in the startup ecosystem in Silicon Valley. He began working with a startup, Craft.co, as its first employee, and it was there that he saw the creative power and ownership found in startups, something unattainable as a part of a large company. This freedom gave him the fulfillment he wasn’t finding before. “It’s a creative freedom, which eventually leads to fulfillment, because you’re working on something you deeply care about,” said Suresh.  

Currently, Suresh is working at ZoomInfo to incorporate the DoubleO.ai platform. For students who have an interest in entrepreneurship, he had this advice: “At the INI, you have the options to explore accounting, business management and entrepreneurship strategy from Tepper or Heinz,” said Suresh. “And you really need that well-rounded education.  

“I think building these foundations and doing those case studies is so critical," said Suresh. "You’re thinking, ‘I just need to maximize my computer science or electrical engineering classes and get a job at Google or Meta.’ But in 10 or 20 years, you’re not going to be at Google or a software company — you’ll probably be thinking of building your own company, and then all these business classes are going to play a huge role.”