Feroze Mohammed is founder and chief executive of Cognida.ai, an AI development, implementation and consulting firm with offices in Lincolnshire, Illinois; Sunnyvale, California; and Hyderabad, India, that he started in 2022 with Abid Mohammed, Deb Acharya and Gopalakrishna Kuppuswamy. A former chief operating officer at Hitachi Vantara, he is known for his push to get enterprise AI out of what he calls “pilot purgatory.”
Sierra Atlantic and Hitachi Before Cognida
He earned a master’s in computer applications from the University of Hyderabad and took executive education at the Indian School of Business and Wharton, he told Pulse 2.0. He spent almost 16 years at Sierra Atlantic leading product development, large integrations and emerging-market expansion, with global delivery for its main business unit of more than 1,200 people. As chief operating officer at Hitachi Vantara he ran the Digital Solutions business unit and Hitachi Consulting’s worldwide profit and loss, overseeing more than 4,500 people.
Getting Out of Pilot Purgatory
“Despite the fact that everyone was investing in AI, the majority were trapped in what I refer to as ‘pilot purgatory.’ The difficulty was in implementation, not the algorithms themselves,” he told Pulse 2.0. Cognida built its Zunō accelerator platform to cut implementation to 10 to 12 weeks from a typical six to eight months, and in February 2025 raised a $15 million Series A led by Nexus Venture Partners (YourStory).