Bobby Mukherjee is the founder and chief executive of Loka, an AI development, implementation and consulting firm in Los Altos, California, that he started in 2004. He spent Loka’s first eight years trying to make it a product company before settling on consulting, and he now runs a distributed team of more than 200 people in 18 countries that builds AI and machine learning systems for clients on AWS.
Naming Loka in 2004
His wife suggested the name, the Sanskrit word for “world.” He first planned a software-as-a-service product, then a search engine optimization service, then a tool that used machine learning and photo-style filters to design resumes. That last idea ended with a grateful customer sending him a chocolate mousse after landing a job. “Unfortunately, to make payroll you need more than chocolate mousse,” he wrote in a 2024 essay on Loka’s first 20 years. He has written that an early business win “when I was basically a kid” gave him “an irrational sense of confidence,” which carried him through those years. Meanwhile he worked as an independent engineering consultant, with clients that included Cisco.
Choosing Consulting Over Products
Around 2012 he decided that consulting brought the most satisfaction to him and to his customers, and he dropped his product plans. He found clients through his own network, added Blue Cross Blue Shield and other healthcare and life sciences companies, and hired machine learning, AI and DevOps specialists from around the world. He also took part-time vice president of engineering roles at startups including Afresh, a grocery logistics company, and Preo, an online payments company. He has described those jobs as a safety net in case Loka failed that also built skills Loka could use.
Working With AWS
Around 2020 he set out to work more closely with AWS, which he says wanted Loka’s healthcare and life sciences experience. By 2024 Loka was one of 32 companies worldwide to hold AWS’s new Generative AI competency and had reached AWS Premier Tier, and he wrote that it had helped more than 150 companies try generative AI, moving most of those projects from proof of concept into production.
He also mentors students at Stanford University, where he tries to pass on his enthusiasm for leading teams and building new products.