NewsVoir
Bangalore (Karnataka) [India], October 12: The most sought-after engineer in Indian technology today is the forward-deployed engineer, the person who sits inside a business, finds the work AI should do and makes it run. Experienced forward-deployed engineers in India now command pay of up to Rs. 1.55 crore a year, and global platforms, AI labs and capability centres are hiring every one they can find. Most Indian enterprises cannot compete for that talent. UNKAPPED Inc., a San Francisco-headquartered firm built by Indian founders, is launching in India to bring that capability to them.
UNKAPPED is an Applied AI and go-to-market engineering firm built on a forward-deployed model. Its engineers work inside a client’s own systems and across departments, from sales and customer service to finance and operations. They find the work that should move to AI, build the agents and automations that do it, and stay until those systems run in production with a measured result.
Three commitments for India
At launch, UNKAPPED has made three commitments. It will take 100 Indian enterprises through its AI-readiness audit by March 2027. It will put AI into production in at least 25 of them by December 2027, each with a measured result. And it will develop 100 India-based forward-deployed engineers by the end of 2028, trained on live enterprise work rather than in a classroom.
The skills gap behind the AI gap
Indian enterprises are not short of AI ambition. Every organisation surveyed by Dun & Bradstreet this year has an AI project underway, yet 44% are still planning or piloting, and only 4% say their data is fully ready to scale AI.
“India does not have a shortage of engineers. It has a shortage of engineers who have shipped AI inside a real business,” said Neeraj Kumar, Co-founder and Chief Technology and Product Officer. “You cannot learn that from a course. Our engineers learn it the way the best forward-deployed teams do: sitting with the business, finding the work and owning the outcome until it runs.”
The India Story
India’s obstacles are also its own. Customer and operations data sits across legacy ERPs, regional systems and spreadsheets. Customers reach businesses in many languages, over WhatsApp, voice and email. The Digital Personal Data Protection rules are raising the bar for how that data can be used. And most enterprises still buy technology the way they bought software: write a specification, hand it to a build partner and wait for delivery.
“India built the world’s software. Now it has to deploy the world’s AI, and that is a different job,” said Sachin Jha, Co-Founder and CEO of UNKAPPED. “The global platforms and labs are hiringforward-deployed engineers as fast as they can, for their largest customers. Every Indian enterprise deserves the same capability, without first having to find and hire it.”
UNKAPPED works across three areas:
- Forward-deployed engineering: Engineers embedded in client teams who connect data, fix access and permissions, wire agents into existing systems and take them to production.
- Applied AI: AI agents for customer service, collections, document processing, sales and operations, with testing, evaluation, human oversight and governance built in.
- GTM engineering: Buyer signals, account scoring, routing and revenue operations engineered so sales teams spend their time on the accounts ready to buy.
“Most enterprises are buying AI the way they bought software,” said Lakshmi Sindhuri, Co-founder and Head of Enterprise Transformation. “That worked for an ERP. AI changes how the work itself gets done, so someone has to be inside the company doing it.”
UNKAPPED’s founders bring product and platform experience from a global cloud provider, enterprise transformation leadership from global banking and payments, and top 1% go-to-market expertise. Its engineers already work alongside platform and forward-deployed teams at major cloud providers. The firm works with companies from pre-seed to PE-backed enterprises, and with the investors behind them.
Every engagement begins with an AI-readiness audit. Enterprises can apply at unkapped.ai or write to hello@unkapped.ai.
About UNKAPPED
UNKAPPED Inc. is an Applied AI and go-to-market engineering firm headquartered in San Francisco. It embeds forward-deployed practice and top 1% GTM experts inside client teams. It helps companies from Series A to private equity-backed enterprises turn their technology investments into working AI systems, scalable revenue operations and measurable returns, with deep expertise in cybersecurity, developer tools, cloud and AI-native software.
YouTube: www.youtube.com/@getUnkapped
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