Nuvalence is a next-generation consulting firm that specializes in innovative AI platforms and product development. And using a Product-Driven approach, Nuvalence empowers organizations across all industries to build for the intelligent digital future. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Nuvalence co-founders Rakesh Malhotra and Sinclair Schuller to learn more about the company.
Background Of The Founders
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Rakesh Malhotra: “I’m a product management leader with over 20 years of experience at both startups and large cloud platform companies, including Microsoft, where I led their foray into the virtualization market and pioneered early enterprise “platform as a service” offerings. I hold a degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo in Canada.”
Sinclair Schuller: “I’m the founder and CEO of $56 million venture-backed enterprise platform company Apprenda (acquired by Atos) and a well-known industry thought leader. A former software engineer at Morgan Stanley with expertise in cloud, OSS and distributed systems, I hold a degree in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.”
Formation Of Nuvalence
How did the idea for Nuvalence come together? Malhotra and Schuller said:
“We believe all companies are becoming software companies in a meaningful way. They need to innovate to stay relevant and achieve their most ambitious goals, and there’s no shortage of tech vendors and products available to help them do that. While more choice sounds like a good problem to have, the reality is that most organizations end up bogged down in those choices, stalling their momentum – or worse, derailing their digital strategy.”
“When we spoke to fellow technology leaders, we learned that the traditional consultants they turned to for help navigating these choices weren’t always focusing on the right things or delivering the most impactful outcomes – not because they didn’t have expertise or talent, but because they simply didn’t have product development in their DNA. After all, it’s pretty hard to help your clients behave like a world-class software company when you’ve never built or been a leader at one yourself.”
“We saw an opening for something totally new: a next-gen consulting firm that doesn’t just focus on completing projects, but on solving the big strategic problems that prevent good organizations from becoming great ones. We knew that by creating an elite team of experienced builders – of products, of services, and of companies – we could offer the kind of expertise that could completely change the game for forward-thinking organizations. The most ambitious organizations aren’t building apps or websites; they are building intelligent platforms that redefine their industries, and our expertise helps them do just that.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Malhotra and Schuller explained:
“The short answer is: we specialize in innovative AI platforms and products that achieve our clients’ most mission-critical goals. But there’s much more to it than that. We offer a wide variety of services to clients across industries, with offerings tailored to every client according to their needs and goals. ‘One size fits all’ isn’t in our vocabulary.”
“For example, our commercial and enterprise clients need to create a competitive edge with their digital strategy. Most of these clients are not starting from scratch; they have existing investments that they are hoping to leverage. We typically start by assessing where they are and propose a roadmap from a talent, organizational design, and technology architecture perspective that sets them up for success. Being builders, we then get to work and help design, build, and deliver complete, modern, scalable, commercial-grade AI platforms that entice developers to the ecosystem and delight customers.”
“Meanwhile, our public sector clients need to deliver high-impact, often life-changing services within the constraints and pressures of an ever-changing technical and legislative landscape. They deserve the same innovative commercial-grade platforms and digital experiences as our enterprise clients, and that’s what we deliver: the kind of secure, high-quality online experiences that defy negative perceptions and empower agencies to reshape their relationship with the public and their own workforce.”
“But just because we build custom solutions doesn’t mean we don’t bring our own powerful IP. We believe that AI-ready accelerators – especially open-source ones – that upend traditional product models are the future. We channel our domain and technical expertise to accelerate everything from chatbots, to government solutions, to AI-powered contact centers and document processors, and even cloud migrations, just to name a few. The result? High-quality, custom-fit solutions and impressive outcomes delivered in weeks and months, rather than years.”
Favorite Memory
What has been a favorite memory working for the company so far? Malhotra and Schuller shared:
“In the early days of the pandemic, Stanford Medicine needed a secure, cloud-based solution to power the delivery of thousands of COVID-19 tests to Bay Area residents – and they needed it fast. We had less than three months to develop an innovative “testing as a service” platform that could solve the immediate local need, with the ability to scale nationally for future public health emergencies. Our team worked tirelessly to get it right and make it available to the people who needed it most: rural and other underrepresented communities for whom testing was literally a matter of life or death. It was gratifying to be a part of an effort that made such a difference in the world; and it also galvanized us as a firm.”
Challenges Faced
Have Malhotra and Schuller faced any specific bottlenecks in your sector of work recently? Malhotra and Schuller acknowledged:
“Overcoming anxiety and creating excitement around AI is a common hurdle for many leaders these days. With any emerging technology, especially technology that’s been fiercely hyped, it’s natural for organizations to be hesitant to lead the way on adoption. When we started Nuvalence, most of our clients had been focused on their digital transformation journeys, trying to reinvent how they do business in a modern world. But what we tell them now is this: ‘If your digital strategy doesn’t deeply consider the impact of AI, it’s dead on arrival.’ We ease these bottlenecks by offering workshops, MVPs, and more to build confidence in AI and demonstrate its intrinsic value in a safe and responsible way. And for clients who want to embrace AI, but aren’t sure how to begin, we can rapidly build proofs of concept that demonstrate how the technology can reinvent cognitive labor in their organization – anything from customer service to software engineering – in just a matter of days.”
“Meanwhile, in the public sector space, there are additional hurdles to overcome. Despite being in urgent need of modernization, government agencies are often held back by lengthy procurement and delivery cycles, use case complexity, and legacy system dependencies. Meanwhile, they often fall into what we call the “innovation gap”: the space between pre-built, one-size-fits-all products that promise flexibility and rapid time-to-value but constrain organizations to a vendor roadmap and add the burden of recurring licensing fees, vs. full custom builds that deliver perfect use-case alignment but can take years to develop, at sometimes astronomical cost. We ease this bottleneck by offering solution accelerators for the most impactful government use cases, which empower agencies to deliver custom experiences to the public without the wait.”
Evolution Of Nuvalence’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Malhotra and Schuller noted:
“Since we launched Nuvalence in 2018, we’ve guided our clients through paradigm-shifting technologies and events, from the digital age, through the remote-work revolution, to the AI era. We pride ourselves on keeping them ahead of the curve every step of the way.”
“At our core, we’re about platforms and human-centered design – harnessing the power of a cloud-native digital platform to unlock data and experiences that simply aren’t possible with most products. As it turns out, this approach was incredibly well-suited to organizations that weren’t fully prepared for the explosion in online experiences during the pandemic; our solutions empowered them to navigate the “new normal” and emerge stronger than ever. And now, thanks to the secure and scalable nature of their platforms, those organizations are ideally positioned to take the next logical step into AI.”
“We’re incredibly energized by AI, and believe it’s transformative in the same way the internet was 30 years ago – if not more so. It transforms how work is done; it transforms physical and online experiences; and it should transform how systems are designed and built.”
“At Nuvalence, we are all-in on AI, using it internally to dramatically accelerate design and development, and applying it to impactful use cases for our clients: reducing call center abandonment rates with virtual agents; deploying chatbots to help customers find fast, accurate answers or to onboard new users; augmenting document processing to reduce fraud, extract valuable data, and boost back-office productivity; migrating to the cloud; and even using AI to share institutional wisdom and connect dots that a traditional knowledge base can’t. And this is just the beginning.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Malhotra and Schuller cited:
“Solution Accelerators for the Public Sector. In October 2023, we launched three state-of-the-art government solution accelerators: Citizen Benefits and Assistance, Licensing and Permits, and Driver and Vehicle Services. Powered by the open-source Digital Suite for Government (DSGov), this new approach to building and delivering premium solutions enables agencies to jumpstart their digital transformation with future-proof customer experiences that are designed to evolve with the agency’s unique needs over time. Watch the video or read the press release.
Google Cloud Partnership for Enterprise Generative AI. Nuvalence’s partnership with Google Cloud accelerates how platforms embrace and embed AI-powered features and experiences to gain a competitive advantage, scale productivity, and drive growth. “We’re excited to grow our work with Nuvalence and support innovation with generative AI across industries.” – Jim Anderson, Vice President, NA Partner Ecosystem & Channels at Google Cloud. Read the press release.
Delivering $2.1 Billion in Pandemic Relief. When the New York State Department of Labor needed a modern, secure, scalable platform to administer the first-of-its-kind Excluded Workers Fund, they turned to Google and Nuvalence. Our selection as a prime consultancy for this engagement highlights our commitment to empowering governments on their journey to digital transformation, using best-in-class modern technology coupled with human-centered design to produce outcome-driven, client-centric results, made possible by a laser focus on hiring and retaining top-tier talent. Read the NYSDOL whitepaper.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking about customer success stories, they highlighted:
“The New York State Department of Labor partnered with us to build and deploy a modern cloud-native platform that delivered $2.1B in pandemic relief to 130K eligible workers in need – in just 12 weeks. Read the client story.”
“Utopus Insights by Vestas partnered with us to deliver a powerful and flexible data-streaming platform capable of processing over 100+ billion solar panel and wind turbine telemetry signals per day, improving the overall efficiency of renewable energy delivery. Read the client story.”
“ADP, in collaboration with AWS and Nuvalence, developed an innovative and secure financial wellness platform serving millions of customers and billions in transactions – in months, not years. Read the client story.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Malhotra and Schuller affirmed:
“Early AI adoption with a platform focus. Lots of companies build custom apps, but for our clients, success requires much more than just an app. They deserve the most scalable, feature-rich, future-proof solutions imaginable – and that requires a platform approach deeply embedded with sophisticated intelligence. Our clients come to us because we have platforms in our DNA and an AI mindset, as well as a proven track record of moving fast and delivering with exceptional quality. Winners in this space must move quickly and be able to adapt to the landscape. As a nimble, smaller firm, we’re able to embrace new challenges rapidly and pass our expertise directly to our clients.”
“We don’t deliver software, we deliver outcomes. Most consulting firms are seen as purely professional services companies that employ developers, project managers, and analysts to do narrowly-focused work. That’s not us. From day 1, our dedicated advisory team engages with key stakeholders on strategy conversations that progress and evolve through the life of the engagement, recalibrating as outcomes are achieved and new goals are identified. Our clients see our engineers, data scientists, designers, and product managers as an extension of their own team; their problems are our problems, and their mission is our mission. From strategy to execution, we are fully immersed in our clients’ organizations and fully invested in their long-term success.”
“Rapid impact. We don’t believe that our clients should have to wait for value. Our product-driven, agile approach, domain and technical expertise, and usage of cutting-edge AI technology are a powerful combination that translates to zero gaps between the start of an engagement and realization of ROI. In a matter of days, we can build complete, end-to-end running prototypes; in weeks, our accelerators can deliver whole, value-driven solutions.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Malhotra and Schuller concluded:
“We are driven to be the foremost leader in the AI consulting space. We set our bar for success as being the best partner our clients have ever worked with, using the latest technologies to create outcomes that were once considered impossible or even unthinkable.”
