The Holy Grail of Business AI: Uniphore's $2.5 Billion Playbook with Umesh Sachdev

Umesh Sachdev, cofounder and CEO of Uniphore, joins Shripati Acharya for a deeply insightful and very real conversation about what it actually takes to build and scale enterprise AI. 

Whether you are a founder, a product leader or someone thinking seriously about enterprise AI, this episode will give you clarity on business AI you won’t find elsewhere.

What you’ll take away:

• A clearer understanding of what Uniphore does as an end-to-end enterprise AI and data platform

• Why so many AI pilots “fail” at first and how that failure can actually be meaningful progress

• How enterprises are achieving predictable outcomes using unitary agents, workflow orchestration, guardrails and fine-tuned SLMs

• The inside story of Uniphore’s strategic raise and why some of the world’s biggest AI and data companies chose to back them

⭐Episode Timestamps

00:00 Introduction

03:00 – What Uniphore Actually Does 

05:47 – Why Enterprise AI Struggles to Scale Beyond Pilots

10:08 – The Determinism Problem: Why AI Gives Different Answers Each Time

12:32 – Unitary Agents and Workflow Orchestration for Predictable AI

14:00 – Small Language Models vs Large LLMs for Enterprise Use Cases

15:25 – Why Guardrails and Governance Matter in Real Deployments

16:39 – One Big Agent Fails but Ten Small Agents Work Better

20:40 – Why AI Pilots Fail and Why That Is a Good Thing

22:20 – Converting Experiments into Enterprise-Scale Adoption

24:26 – 35,000 Invoices a Week with Only Four Humans: ROI Case Study

26:25 – What Enterprises Really Look for in AI Systems

28:45 – Lessons from Building Across India and the US

32:51 – Why Founders Must Be Close to Their Biggest Market

34:44 – Structuring Teams Across Geographies for Global Scale

38:10 – The Journey of Building Uniphore Over Seventeen Years

42:36 – Hard Lessons Learned Along the Way

46:45 – Why NVIDIA, Snowflake, AMD and Databricks Invested

51:17 – How the Strategic Round Came Together

52:22 – Closing Note

If this conversation resonates with you, drop your biggest takeaway in the comments and subscribe for more in-depth founder and VC discussions.

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