Puneet Agarwal recently joined Komprise as Vice President of Engineering, based in the company’s Bangalore office. In this role, he will drive quality excellence across the Komprise platform and lead the development of AI-focused engineering capabilities. He brings extensive experience from progressively senior engineering leadership roles, with a strong track record in building and scaling teams for cloud platforms and big data solutions.
Prior to joining Komprise, Puneet held senior engineering leadership roles at Project44, AWS, Qubole, and Nutanix, and earlier served as a Principal Software Engineer at Citrix.
How would you describe yourself as an Engineering leader?
I consider myself an authentic leader who leads with empathy. My approach is to empower teams, provide guidance, and ensure strong alignment with business objectives. While organizational hierarchy is sometimes necessary, I strive to keep it minimal and to foster an environment of trust, openness, and support. I genuinely enjoy building and leading teams, a passion I first discovered during my time at Nutanix.
Why did you decide to join Komprise in this new opportunity?
I recognized the rapid growth and strategic importance of unstructured data, along with the Komprise platform’s strong ability to address critical enterprise challenges. Komprise optimizes storage by intelligently moving data to the most appropriate tier once high-performance access is no longer required. In parallel, the company is building groundbreaking capabilities for secure, accurate, and cost-efficient AI data pipelines, addressing one of the most pressing needs for modern enterprises.
I was also drawn to the Komprise culture. Many employees have been with the company for a long time, which is a strong indicator of a healthy and effective organization. Likewise, the co-founders have worked together across multiple companies for many years. When people stay together to solve meaningful, complex problems, it creates something truly special.
What is exciting and interesting to you about the unstructured data management sector?
Data is being generated at a faster pace than ever. As data gets cold it does not need to be stored in the primary storage. Komprise excels at handling large-scale data and features patented Transparent Move Technology which eliminates user disruption and reduces lock-in.
AI is enabling organizations to generate new value from unstructured data. A barrier though is that there can be multiple versions of unstructured data and departments need a single source of truth. Komprise can help find the latest data and even automate feeding the new information to LLMs. This way, GenAI can give employees and customers more accurate, meaningful answers. Advanced tools to manage and filter unstructured data will be invaluable to eliminate hallucinations, false outcomes and poor ROI from AI.
What are your thoughts on the role of AI in development?
AI is proving to accelerate execution not only in software engineering, but across the broader business. We aim to systematically integrate AI across the entire software development lifecycle, including front-end and user experience design, automated boilerplate and feature code generation, and test case creation and execution. AI will also support continuous code quality and security reviews, intelligent debugging and root-cause analysis, and proactive incident detection. Together, these capabilities will deliver faster, more reliable, and higher-quality software delivery.
When developing small, well-contained microservices to extend functionality, AI can significantly accelerate delivery while improving code quality.
Embracing AI is essential to remaining competitive; avoiding it would place us at a disadvantage. Accordingly, we will deploy AI selectively in areas that maximize business impact and return on investment.
What will be your focus this year at Komprise?
We are continuing to advance the platform as our enterprise customer needs evolve in the context of AI data pipelines, storage cost optimization and ongoing security and ransomware threats. In 2025, we delivered sensitive data management capabilities and Komprise Intelligent AI Ingest. Beyond ongoing investments in AI and security features of the platform, we’ll be adding more advanced features for our Global Metadatabase and Komprise Elastic Data Migration. All that said, we will continue to drive and improve product quality, addressing key customer pain points and developing systems to proactively identify issues and self-repair. Equally important to our success is attracting and retaining world-class talent. Maintaining a highly motivated and engaged team is therefore a top priority.
How do you motivate employees and inspire great work?
Our teams derive strong satisfaction from knowing that their work directly impacts and is valued by our customers. We remain relentlessly customer-focused, continuously improving product usability and executing against a well-defined roadmap. At the same time, we are committed to ensuring that our technical staff work on initiatives aligned with their interests and are empowered to leverage AI to enhance productivity and effectiveness. Ultimately, our goal is to create an environment supporting continuous learning, the delivery of meaningful customer value, and clear, structured career growth opportunities.
What do you like to do in your free time?
That mostly depends on what my teenage kids want to do: usually watching a movie, traveling, playing sports, or going to the gym together.
