I'm Vignesh Mohankumar, and Nila is my independent consulting practice. I partner with technical leaders to ship production AI systems. Have an idea? Reach out.
Background
I've partnered with companies in industries including enterprise SaaS, consumer social, healthcare, fintech, and crypto.
Prior to consulting, I was an early engineer at two AI-driven companies that were acquired:
- Drift: Conversational AI for marketing and sales (acquired by Vista Equity Partners for $1.2B)
- Kensho: AI for financial services (acquired by S&P Global for $550M)
Testimonials
“Vignesh helped our staff engineers build a strong understanding of applied AI and showed them how to use AI tools to speed up development in meaningful ways. He played a key role in shaping our AI roadmap, helping the team get clear on both what to build and how to build it. He also designed the systems that let us run all our models on internal infrastructure, ensuring customer data stays private and secure. His guidance helped us move faster in the near term while laying the groundwork for long-term growth in our AI capabilities.”
“Vignesh helped us get our AI system to production within a month with an architecture designed to support future product goals we had in mind. He set us up to improve our systems over time by building an evaluation system and upleveling our team on best practices in applied AI engineering.”
“Vignesh helped us build our LLM infrastructure from scratch, cutting through buzzwords to implement solutions that deliver measurable improvements. His deep understanding of how LLMs work in production and ability to write high-quality code that actually works, not just demos, was invaluable. He helped us across the stack—from data pipelines to prompts to testing.”
“Our onboarding flow needed to capture user preferences in a natural and effective way. Vignesh experimented with generative AI approaches and developed a system that turned chatbot conversations into structured insights. His work was essential to delivering the experience we envisioned.”
“Our team needed to build a frontend interface for a conversational AI application for a large prospective customer on a tight timeline. Vignesh stepped in and integrated our chat SDK and NLX platform into a solution that could easily be productized. The solution worked to specification and was a key part of how we showcased our capabilities to the client. His ability to deliver under pressure made all the difference.”
About

I'm based in New York, NY. I grew up in New England and was born near Chennai, India. Nila means moon in my native language Tamil (my sister suggested the name).
Find me on LinkedIn, X and my personal blog.