The Remarkable Journey of Sonali Jha
– by Nikhil Shrivastava
While success stories abound in the bright lights of cities and on the hallowed halls of academia, Sonali Jha’s story commences in a small village in Madhya Pradesh. She has taken her on a path to global tech platforms and fame on the global stage. She is the Founder and CEO of Cunomial Technologies, an AI-first, cloud-native enterprise software company working with institutions, governments and businesses across the globe. Her story is an inspiring example of how technical proficiency, conviction and strong values can combine to not only create a successful business model but also make it impactful.
Sonali jha considers her village as the most beautiful place in the universe. her parents still live there and she credits them with allowing her to pursue her education further, as many of her relatives chose to pursue more traditional courses of study, such as B.A. and B.Com. She completed her Computer Engineering degree from MANIT (formerly known as MACT), Bhopal and is proud to have become the first girl in her entire family to pursue an engineering degree.
Her journey has been far from linear. In pursuit of her Master’s from New York university in the United States, Sonali interned at the Stern School of Business, New York University, working with Professors Jinoo Kattani and Benjamin Cole. During one project, she needed a large dataset from IMDb, and as a technologist, Sonali wrote a web crawler that worked round the clock and managed to fetch half a million entries. While it was an achievement for her, it also got her company a legal notice from IMDb and a call for the NYU Director. While told to shut it down, it also tested her guts and integrity in a foreign academic system. Her professors acknowledged her talent and good intentions, which strengthened their professional relationship for many years to come.
The real test, however, came later for Sonali after she returned to India and founded her own company. During COVID-19 pandemic, her startup had to compete with the likes of Microsoft Teams. For almost nine months, they had only one client paying ₹1,000, barely enough to pay the salary of her single employee. Around Diwali, Sonali felt exhausted and thought of giving up. Even asking her husband, who was then a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley, to help find a job so that she could quit and return to a stable corporate world. What kept her from giving up was seeing the commitment and loyalty of that employee, whose commitment inspired her to continue.
Before taking the road less travelled by becoming an entrepreneur, Sonali built an impressive professional career. After completing her Master’s, Sonali joined Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the United States, working directly with Nobel laureate James Watson, known for his discovery of DNA’s structure. Sonali has spoken about working on genome sequencing and publishing multiple papers in top-rated international journals such as Science and Nature on landmark genomics initiatives. After realizing that she wanted to return to India, Sonali made a strategic switch to the Private Wealth Management division of Goldman Sachs and expressed her belief that “technology is agnostic… if you know technology, you can build it for anyone.” At Goldman Sachs, Sonali built technology for ultra-high net worth individuals, including Bill Gates and gained valuable experience in high-reliability mission-critical financial technology. Despite a comfortable life for herself in New York and acquiring a U.S. green card, Sonali returned India and joined Goldman Sachs’s Bangalore office in 2014. Working for a year before resigning to start on her own. Sonali’s decision to start on her own was not taken for comfort rather, it was for higher purpose. Sonali has spoken about how, despite having a life of comfort in the United States, she still felt that the impact she was creating was negligible. Sonali has also spoken about the racism and glass ceilings that prevented Indians from rising to the highest positions in corporations outside India.
In 2018, Sonali founded Cunomial Technologies. Cunomial is a SaaS company that offers innovation management and enterprise workflow solutions. Cunomial provides AI-first and cloud-native digital infrastructure to institutions to modernize their operations and deliver complex programs like innovation contests, campus hiring and CSR initiatives at scale. Cunomial currently supports over 200 organizations with over 10 million applications and records processed and 99.9% uptime for its customers in Asia, Africa and North America by 2026. Cunomial offers three flagship products: Accubate, Oblic and Tanzent (also known as Tangent or Tanzent) for campus recruitment and workflow automation. Cunomial and its products have achieved significant recognition and accolades from ecosystem leaders and industry organizations. Accubate has been recognized and highlighted by Guinness World Records.
Sonali’s philosophy has been simple- grow sustainably, stay customer-centric and own the mission of the company. Cunomial’s future plans include further in-depth penetration into the global market, powering more government-scale initiatives and continuing to build more robust, AI-powered, multi-tenant SaaS systems that the world’s institutions can trust and use as critical digital infrastructure.
Sonali has built an illustrious professional and personal life, similar to the growth and development of Cunomial Technologies. Sonali has made significant contributions to genomics research, publishing papers in top-tier journals and has since applied her expertise to financial technology, serving some of the most influential clients across the globe. Sonali has received numerous national and international awards and accolades as an entrepreneur, including being awarded Iconic Woman of the Year (2021) by NASSCOM, MeitY and UN Women. She has also received recognition from industry leaders and stalwarts such as Microsoft and Google. Sonali has also received the prestigious award of winning the SelectUSA Tech Pitching Event in Washington, D.C. competing against participants from over 90 countries. She has also had the honor of being part of an exclusive roundtable event with Satya Nadella in 2024. In collaboration with Women in Cloud, Sonali has also achieved a Guinness World Record related to vision boarding.
Sonali has also made significant contributions to Indian and global society as an entrepreneur. She is a contributing author to ‘The Symphony of Innovation’ (University Press, IIT Madras), where she writes about India’s startup ecosystem and how digital platforms can scale up support for incubators, accelerators and government initiatives. Her platforms have now become integral to delivering mission-critical national initiatives, including defense work with NTRO and three out of four hubs under the Quantum Mission of the Government of India. Her company has achieved a rare 100% retention rate of clients and employees and has grown to serve hundreds of institutional clients across finance, education, public policy and social innovation.
What is special about Sonali is not what she has created, but how she chooses to live and lead. Sonali’s attitude to money and values is now a lot more disciplined. Sonali’s leadership is also about loyalty. One of the most telling examples of this is that she remained with the company when it was in its lowest state. Sonali is also committed to her village and is active in giving back to it. Sonali had also enabled a group of 12 village women to produce and sell organic Holi colours, achieving a sale of about ₹5 lakh in recent times. She had not only invested in this venture but had also not claimed her money back, indicating that she believed in empowerment and not charity. Sonali’s decisions to travel back to India when she was pregnant and give birth to her children in India are also indicative of her values of belonging and being rooted to her country and its culture, even when she is a part of a global ecosystem.
Some of the lessons we may draw from Sonali Jha’s success on what it means to be successful are, while she has managed to combine world-class technical success with unwavering values and a clear sense of purpose, she has also managed to combine it with courage. Courage to challenge the status quo at NYU, courage to leave a successful life behind in the US to build a new one in India, or courage to survive on a measly ₹1,000 client for nine months. While success is often defined by what we have accomplished or what we have acquired, it is also defined by what we have given back to society or to others.
Sonali Jha is an outstanding figure in the world of successful individuals because she has managed to combine world-class technical success with unwavering values and a clear sense of purpose. Her success is not defined by the fact that Cunomial has hundreds of customers, wins international awards, or has a valuation to boast of. Her success is defined by the fact that she has managed to stay grounded-bootstrapping thoughtfully, investing in her team, not compromising on data security and using success to lift others in her village and beyond.
