HumanTronik, an AI startup co-founded by Icertis co-founder Monish Darda, has acquired CloudMoyo, the Bellevue tech services firm that Darda helped spin out of Icertis in 2015.
The deal keeps two of CloudMoyo’s co-founders in charge: Darda, as CEO of its new parent company, and Manish Kedia, who continues to run CloudMoyo day to day. The family of the late Samir Bodas, CloudMoyo’s other co-founder and the longtime CEO of Icertis, sold its stake in CloudMoyo as part of the transaction, Kedia said.
Darda co-founded HumanTronik earlier this year with Singapore-based investor and early Icertis backer Kabir Narang. The company is developing what it calls “human language models,” its phrase for AI that learns how specific executives make decisions and work with others. Those models power AI agents inside Microsoft Outlook, Teams and other workplace software.
Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. CloudMoyo, as part of HumanTronik, will keep its name and existing customer contracts, and will sell and implement HumanTronik’s technology in addition to its existing lines of business.
The business model: Kedia calls the approach “Service as Software.” Customers pay for software, he said, with ongoing support from CloudMoyo built into the subscription. Pricing is shifting from per-user fees toward fees based on results.
It’s part of a broader blurring of the lines between software and services across the industry, including the rise of forward-deployed engineers who work inside customers’ businesses to put AI to use.
- Sequoia Capital’s Julien Bek argued in a March essay that the next $1 trillion company will be “a software company masquerading as a services firm,” noting that companies spend $6 on services for every $1 on software.
- Anthropic formed a $1.5 billion services venture in May with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs, aimed at midsize businesses.
- OpenAI launched its Deployment Company the same month with more than $4 billion in initial investment, embedding its engineers inside businesses.
CloudMoyo has more than 300 consultants. Over the past two years, its work has expanded from mostly implementing Icertis contract software to building AI tools on Microsoft’s Fabric data platform, for customers including Seattle-based Expeditors and Mexican railroad Ferromex. That AI business is growing at about 100%, outpacing the company’s more traditional work, Kedia said.
Kedia gave the example of a procurement director trying to cut spending by two points this year. HumanTronik’s agents would draw on conversations with suppliers and internal discussions, along with the company’s business data, to help the director and their team reach that goal.
How the deal came together: The acquisition moved quickly, Kedia said. He and Darda met in the Bay Area three to four months ago to talk about CloudMoyo’s AI work, and Darda showed him what HumanTronik was building. Negotiations took about two months.
Because Darda was a major shareholder in both companies and on the CloudMoyo board, he was not directly involved in the negotiations, according to Kedia, who noted that each side had its own legal counsel.
The founders have known one another for years, which made the talks easier, Kedia said. “We are staying within the families,” he said.
The Icertis connection: Darda co-founded Icertis with Bodas in 2009 and served as its CTO for about 17 years before stepping back in April to start HumanTronik. His title at Icertis is now chief mentor.
Kedia, who at one point led business development for Microsoft’s SQL Server database software, was president of Icertis for several months before leading the CloudMoyo spinout in 2015.
Icertis has no financial stake in HumanTronik or CloudMoyo, Kedia said, though the companies continue to work together. Icertis has been led by interim co-CEOs Rajat Bahri and Jim Moffatt since Anand Subbaraman departed in July, less than a year after succeeding Bodas. Bloomberg reported in February that Icertis was working with Goldman Sachs to explore a potential sale.
Narang led Icertis’s Series A funding round in 2015 while at Fidelity’s venture arm, Eight Roads, and later became a founding partner at B Capital.
Headquarters and headcount: HumanTronik is headquartered in San Francisco, where it plans to open an engineering center. Darda is based in Pune, India, where CloudMoyo has an engineering center, and HumanTronik is setting up a subsidiary in Singapore.
Nearly all of CloudMoyo’s employees are becoming HumanTronik employees, joining a few HumanTronik engineering leaders in the Bay Area, Kedia said. The combined company has about 20 people in the Seattle area, where CloudMoyo has had an office in Bellevue for the past decade. Kedia, who lives in the region, said the company plans to hire engineering, product and sales staff here.
That’s up from about 15 in 2016, when GeekWire last wrote about CloudMoyo. At the time, most of its roughly 200 employees were in Pune.
The name CloudMoyo came from a word the founders picked up while traveling: “moyo” means heart or spirit in Swahili. After the HumanTronik deal, Kedia said, the company’s new motto is “human with a heart.”