Thomas Thayyil Thomas is the founder and CEO of Teragonia, the Chicago, Illinois, firm that builds AI agents for private equity-backed companies. He is a chartered accountant known for building deal analytics practices at Houlihan Lokey (Teragonia).
Accounting and deal advisory
He qualified as a chartered accountant with the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland and holds master’s degrees from the University of Strathclyde in the UK and Mahatma Gandhi University in India. He spent more than a decade at Ernst & Young in its assurance, M&A diligence, and strategy consulting practices in Europe and North America (Teragonia).
Building practices at Houlihan Lokey
He then spent five years at Houlihan Lokey, where he started two practices from scratch: a financial due diligence practice and a data science practice. He led the design of a secure data science platform that hosted thousands of users and supported several hundred clients, and built analytics apps for deal sourcing, pricing, and customer retention on it (Teragonia).
Founding Teragonia
At Teragonia he paired former deal advisors with AI engineers, and in October 2026 he launched Astra Labs, which sells AI work as fixed-fee engagements with guaranteed outcomes. “What they want is AI that changes how the business runs, and they need it immediately, not 18 months from now,” he said at the launch (Teragonia). Our Teragonia review covers the firm.