Uttam Kumaran is the founder and CEO of Brainforge, the Austin, Texas, data and AI consultancy, and a California-born computer engineer who led data projects at WeWork and Flowcode before starting his own firm (Bucknell University; Brainforge).
A computer engineer at Bucknell who also ran money
Kumaran grew up in California and expected to go to a state university there, but his father, a first-generation immigrant, pushed him toward a liberal arts college on the East Coast (Bucknell University). He majored in computer engineering at Bucknell, graduating in 2018, and as a sophomore talked his way into the Student Managed Investment Fund, usually reserved for senior management students, taking summer courses to qualify (Bucknell University). Through the university’s Small Business Development Center he co-launched Maker EDU, a venture that helped schools build maker spaces (Bucknell University).
From WeWork and Flowcode to Brainforge
After graduating he joined WeWork, where he managed data projects from sales compensation to work for its IPO, and then Flowcode, where he helped grow the data team during the QR code boom of the COVID-19 years (Bucknell University). Tired of grind culture, he gave himself three months to decide what came next and reached out to everyone he knew; Brainforge came out of that search in 2023 (Bucknell University; Contra). “Every day, we challenge ourselves to be better than we were yesterday,” he has said of the firm, and he calls the constant context switching between client work and running payroll and benefits the hardest part of the job (Bucknell University). In 2024 the Bucknell University Alumni Association put him on its 30 Under 30 list (Bucknell University).