Pratish Pillay

Pratish serves as Chief Technology Officer of Ajira AI LLC, a start-up he co-founded in July 2017. He oversees technology and product development at Ajira AI and has over 20 years of experience architecting software to solve complex problems. He has designed, built and deployed software solutions using a wide range of technologies.

Pratish has been working extensively in the workers compensation insurance space since 2004, designing and implementing systems for TPAs, Carriers, MGAs and state funds. He is currently occupied with designing modern applications using development platforms such as NodeJS, Aurelia, JavaScript, C#, .NET Core Framework and mobile app development for iOS and Android. He is deeply involved in bringing AI capabilities to workers compensation insurance.

In the recent past, Pratish served as a project lead to implement a grant making software for one of the largest private foundations in the world. The solution allowed the foundation to optimize the grant process and complex internal workflows and approvals in grant decision making.

In 2007, Pratish worked with nPhase LLC, a start-up that was spun off from PCS, designing service-oriented machine to machine (now IoT) solutions using .NET Framework and web services. These innovative solutions were capable of interfacing with various types of sensors that ranged from monitoring water flow rate in public sewers to beacon lamps atop cell towers and responding in real time to critical sensor readings. This startup was successful and was sold to Qualcomm in 2006.

Earlier in his career, Pratish worked on a multitude of newer technologies of the time, such as Java, J2EE, JSP, EJB, ASP.NET, C#.NET, ADO.NET, MS SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase and Web Services. He took a special liking to C#, given his deep expertise and fondness for C++ and in 2004 wrote an HTTP Reverse Proxy client for a large Workers Comp TPA client of PCS. Pratish wrote the reverse proxy client in C# and deployed it in a DMZ outside the corporate firewall. The program performed HTTP request authentication, URL masking and translation to internal addresses, and response URL translation back to the client.

In 2002, Pratish had the opportunity to work for one of the largest US banks in trust and private wealth management by designing an enterprise class system that managed asset categories classes and asset performance. The platform was able to calculate IRR and projected IRR based on what if scenarios and fees charged by the bank. He architected and led the team that wrote the application server in C++ and C integrating Oracle CLI at a time when Java application servers were still immature and not capable of processing millions of transactions per minute.

Pratish began his career in 1998 as a systems programmer building a calibration program for testing the accuracy of digital multimeters using C++. One of his more complex assignments was designing a custom instruction set similar to that of the 8085/8086 processors which his program was able to parse and execute for each device being calibrated, thus gaining efficiencies in the manufacturing process. He worked extensively in C and C++, BSD Unix and Sun Solaris platforms during the early days of his career.

Pratish has a Master of Computer Science degree from the University of Pune, India. He also holds a Bachelor of Computer Science from the University of Pune, India.