Name: Hema Raghavan
Company: Kumo
Position: Co-Founder and Head of Engineering
Website: https://kumo.ai/
About Hema Raghavan
I am Hema Raghavan, co-founder and VP of Engineering at Kumo.ai, where I lead the team building the first foundation model for enterprise relational data, making predictive AI accessible to organizations of every size.
Before founding Kumo, I spent over a decade leading AI and machine learning teams at LinkedIn, where I built the systems behind People You May Know and other core recommendation products that helped scale the platform from 400 million to 700 million users. Earlier in my career, I worked as a Research Staff Member at IBM and a Scientist at Yahoo. I hold a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Mumbai.
I co-founded Kumo in 2021 after identifying a fundamental gap in enterprise AI. Every company sits on years of relational data (customers, transactions, products, behaviors) spread across warehouse tables, yet extracting predictive insight from it still required months of manual feature engineering by specialized teams. We changed that by applying Relational Graph Transformers to understand the connections across database tables, treating relationships between entities as a graph structure. The result is KumoRFM, the first foundation model built specifically for structured enterprise data, enabling zero-shot predictions directly from a data warehouse without task-specific training.
The technical innovation was considered counterintuitive. Prevailing wisdom held that structured data lacked the sequential patterns necessary for transformer architectures. My team and I demonstrated otherwise. By representing relational databases as temporal heterogeneous graphs, we achieved transfer learning across different schemas and datasets, eliminating feature engineering entirely. Not through automation, but by making it architecturally unnecessary.
As one of the few women co-founders leading a deep-tech AI company, I navigate an industry where female technical leaders remain significantly underrepresented. I am also a mother of two, and those roles shape how I lead: with empathy, grit, and long-term perspective. What keeps me grounded is when my daughter writes in her school essays that I am her role model for entrepreneurship and work ethic. That reminder, that the impact of my work extends well beyond the company, is my True North.
The results speak for themselves. Kumo was named to the Forbes AI 50 list and won Fast Company Next Big Things in Tech. Our platform now operates in production at over 20 enterprises, including DoorDash, Databricks, Snowflake, and Reddit, generating predictions for more than one billion users globally. DoorDash deployed Kumo in one week and achieved a 1.8 percent engagement increase driving monthly active user growth. Across clients, we have delivered 142 percent more accurate fraud detection, 5.4x conversion rate improvements, and over 100 million dollars in GMV impact, with model development that is 20x faster than traditional approaches. Kumo has raised 37 million dollars in funding led by Sequoia Capital, and our Snowflake Native App and Databricks integrations allow enterprises to deploy within their existing infrastructure.
I am driven by the belief that predictive intelligence should be as accessible as querying a database. My goal is to leave behind a standard where AI is practical, ethical, and accessible, and where women in deep tech see a clear path to building meaningful companies and raising families at the same time.
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