Founding story
My journey to building Whirl AI and my commitment to my fellow CIOs
Fresh out of grad school, I landed in Management Consulting on the Business Process track. They taught us to parachute into any company or industry and help customers succeed. The playbook was simple: document the "as-is state," find the bottlenecks, and identify improvements in speed, cost, or productivity.
Founder & CEO
But something bothered me from day one. Why didn't companies already know this about themselves? Why was critical operational knowledge locked in the heads of a few experts? And why were organizations paying us hundreds of thousands of dollars to have twenty-somethings run around asking questions that felt...obvious?
The more companies I worked with, the more industries I saw, the more this gnawed at me. This wasn't an isolated problem; it was everywhere. I couldn't shake this vision: what if companies had a living system that knew their current state, kept itself up to date, and made that knowledge accessible to everyone?
"I wanted the world to stop waiting on Enterprise IT and start leading with it."
Sunny Bedi, Founder & CEO
Years later, when I moved into the CIO/IT Leadership function — first at VMWARE, then NVIDIA, then Snowflake — I found myself on the other side of that frustration. I was responsible for helping finance, operations, sales, and marketing scale through automation. And I watched my teams struggle with the same impossible math: a third of our time went to keeping the lights on, another third to service tickets and employee issues, and whatever scraps remained went to actually transforming the business.
Every CIO I talked to wanted the same thing: to flip that equation, to spend 80% of our time on transformation instead of 20%. We threw everything at it: Agile, shift-left, cloud migrations, ticket avoidance strategies. We made progress, but it was painfully incremental. I kept thinking: there has to be a better way.
Then, 18 months ago, everything changed. AI didn't just arrive; it exploded. And suddenly it was obvious: if we in IT didn't fundamentally reimagine our work through AI, we'd be obsolete.
As a CIO, I became the target for every vendor's "AI solution." Pitch after pitch, demo after demo. Each one promised to incrementally improve some specific workflow for some specific persona. But here's what struck me: no one was offering to fundamentally transform how the Office of the CIO operates. No one was thinking big enough.
After months of experimenting—building internally and testing external platforms, I had a moment of clarity. The platform I'd been imagining for twenty years, the one that could actually elevate Enterprise IT from reactive to transformative, didn't exist. And with AI, it could finally be built.
So last year, I left Snowflake. I launched Whirl AI to build what I'd spent two decades wishing for:
- A platform that actually knows your organization: not a snapshot from last quarter, but a living, breathing understanding of your current state across every application and process.
- Built on agentic infrastructure: with agents designed by people who've lived in the trenches of Enterprise IT, not by engineers guessing at our problems.
- Architected for security from the ground up: immutable infrastructure that never needs patching, because security can't be an afterthought.
- Designed around how humans actually work: because let's be honest, Enterprise IT has treated user experience like it doesn't matter. Process transformation is messy and cross-functional. We're building something that brings Business and IT together without friction, that makes collaboration feel natural instead of painful.
This had to be built from the ground up. No shortcuts.
What used to take weeks now takes days. What took days now takes hours.
We're not incrementally improving workflows. We're changing how IT and Business work together.
We're just getting started — and if you're a CIO, IT leader, or operator who's felt this pain, we'd love to connect.