Khanna built Tellius to close the gap between dashboards that only show what happened and machine-learning tools that only data scientists can run, so business teams can ask why a number moved.
Ajay Khanna is the founder and chief executive of Tellius, an AI decision-intelligence platform that combines machine-learning automation with natural-language search so business teams can investigate why metrics change. He is a technical founder with more than 25 years building enterprise products.
Leading Telecom Analytics at Celcite
Before Tellius he was chief technology officer and a founding member of Celcite, a telecom analytics company later acquired by Amdocs, according to a conversation with Karen Walker. That work taught him how hard it is for operators to move from raw network data to decisions that field and commercial teams can act on.
Seeing Two Silos That Never Met
He founded Tellius in 2016 after watching business intelligence tools such as Tableau do a strong job of reporting what happened, while machine-learning platforms stayed locked to data scientists. Business analysts still had to figure out why a number moved. "Tellius is an AI-driven decision intelligence platform," he told TechCrunch, "and what we do is we combine machine learning with a Google-like natural language interface."
Raising a Series A to Close the Insight Gap
In April 2021 Tellius raised an $8 million Series A led by Sands Capital Ventures, with Grotech participating, bringing total funding to about $17 million at the time. Khanna framed the round as a bet on putting finished analysis in front of commercial leaders in minutes instead of days.
Teaching Tellius Industry Vocabulary
The company now markets itself as Decision AI for the enterprise, with customers in areas such as life sciences and consumer goods that need industry vocabulary built into the analysis, according to the Tellius about page. Khanna's pitch is that the smartest models still do not know a company's KPIs until someone teaches them.
