Aarti Joshi, the Co-Founder and CEO of Modak, is one of the most important people in the fast-changing fields of data engineering and analytics. Joshi has worked in the IT services industry for almost 20 years. Under his leadership, Modak has become a global leader in cloud technologies and data engineering, changing the way businesses manage and use their data landscapes. Her journey, which includes being innovative, strong, and dedicated to helping women in tech, is an inspiration for both entrepreneurs and techies.
How Modak Started
Aarti Joshi started Modak in 2010 with Milind Chitgupakar to meet the growing need for advanced data management tools. Modak started out as a small data engineering company in Hyderabad, India, and focused on helping small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) use point-of-sale (POS) data. Joshi, on the other hand, quickly saw the problems with this market, which had low profit margins and a lack of knowledge about big data analytics. Modak changed its focus to bigger businesses, especially in the Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) sector. There, it created advanced analytics products like Enterprise Data Warehouse, RapidETL, Master Data Management, and Campaign Management Systems.
Under Joshi’s direction, Modak has grown from a team of three to a dynamic company with more than 450 employees, a tenfold increase. The company now works with Fortune 100 companies to do petabyte-scale data engineering projects that help businesses make decisions based on data. Joshi’s vision of automating complicated data processes is shown in Modak’s main product, Nabu. Nabu is an enterprise platform that combines data discovery, ingestion, preparation, cataloging, unification, quality, and profiling into one system. This makes it much faster to create and deploy data pipelines. Gartner’s 2019 Market Guide to Data Preparation featured Nabu.
A Leader in Data Analytics
Joshi is an expert in data analytics, big data, data warehousing, and cloud migration. He has worked in multicultural teams in different parts of the world for many years. One of Modak’s biggest accomplishments as leader was the creation of India’s first Big Data-based electoral repository system in 2014. It looked at 18 terabytes of data from 814 million Indian voters. Modak showed that she could handle difficult, large-scale problems by working on this project, which involved figuring out different types of electoral data in a number of Indian languages. The information helped a national political party create campaigns that were specific to each area, which helped them win the election.
Joshi and her team came up with new tools like Fuzzy Logic Matching and RAPID-ETL (Extraction, Transformation, and Loading) to deal with the fact that India’s voter data is in many different languages. Some of these tools are now patent-pending. This project not only showed how good Modak is at technology, but it also made it a leader in using big data to make a difference in society.
Supporting Women in Tech
Aarti Joshi’s leadership goes beyond coming up with new technologies to making the tech industry more open to everyone. She is proud that more than 30% of Modak’s data engineers are women, and many of them are in charge of making Nabu. Joshi thinks that women have different points of view and skills that have been very important to Modak’s success. She was honored for her dedication to gender diversity in January 2023 when she won the FLO Hyderabad Business Award in the technology sector, which was given to her by Telangana’s IT Minister, KT Rama Rao. The award honored her for helping Modak grow into a dynamic, women-led business that sets standards for impact and innovation.
A leader with many sides
Joshi is a well-known person in the tech world outside of her job at Modak. She is a member of the Forbes Technology Council, where she gives her thoughts on data engineering and cloud technologies. She is also on the Board of Governors of an independent college in Hyderabad and a board member of a local NGO, which shows how committed she is to education and making a difference in the world. Joshi talks about entrepreneurship, data strategy, and women in tech at many industry events as a speaker and panelist.
Joshi’s education makes her even more qualified. She graduated from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business in 2023–2024. She also has degrees from the Indian School of Business, the University of Nebraska, and Savitribai Phule Pune University. She can easily handle difficult technical and business problems because she has a global view and has done things herself.
The Global Impact of Modak
Modak is based in Deer Park, Illinois, but it also has offices in Hyderabad and Mumbai and serves clients all over the world. The company’s cloud-based business intelligence and data management platform has features like data discovery, intelligent cataloging, data mapping, standardization, fingerprinting, and anonymization. Modak is a trusted partner for businesses that want to go digital because it offers data migration, visualization, metaprogramming, and data lake management, among other things.
With Joshi’s help, Modak has gotten money from angel investor Madhavi Aurangabadkar and made smart investments in companies like Arthtechglobal and Arth. As of April 2018, Modak had 108 employees and was ranked among 3,369 active competitors. The company continues to come up with new ideas in a crowded market, going up against big names like Informatica and Quantiphi.
Aarti Joshi’s time with Modak shows that she can adapt, come up with new ideas, and lead in a fast-paced industry. She has always pushed the limits, from building India’s biggest database of election data to turning Modak into a global leader in data engineering. Because she cares about everyone and is good with technology, she is a great role model for people who want to start their own business or work in technology.
As Modak grows, Joshi stays focused on pushing for new ideas and giving the next generation of data-driven businesses the tools they need to succeed. Modak is ready to change the future of data engineering with her at the helm. This shows that visionary leadership and cutting-edge technology can change both industries and societies.
