Arjun Prakash is co-founder and chief executive of Distyl AI, the San Francisco, California company he started in 2022 with Derek Ho. He is known for bringing the embedded, forward-deployed model he learned at Palantir Technologies to enterprise AI (Dell Technologies Capital).
Growing Up Around Kirana Stores
He grew up in India, where small neighborhood kirana stores make up most of the retail market. He has cited those shopkeepers, who know each customer and build from the customer backward, as the model for the customer focus he wants at Distyl.
Years at Palantir
He and Ho spent years at Palantir, where they saw deeply integrated software teams change how large institutions operated. After leaving, they watched one AI tooling startup after another fail to deliver value, because enterprises did not know how to get the most from the tools they bought.
Founding Distyl AI
They started Distyl to supply the integration they found missing, just as large language models reached mainstream use. Distyl pairs engineers and researchers with its own software to put AI systems into production at Fortune 500 companies. It raised a $175 million Series B in September 2025 (Crunchbase News). Read our review of Distyl AI.
“Everybody in AI was building tools available to enterprises, but enterprises didn’t necessarily know how to create the most value from those tools.”