Twenty-Five Years of Showing Up Right

How a single client engagement in 2001 became a global enterprise partner trusted by Fortune 500 companies, and why the original conviction still runs the show.

Some companies are born from a market gap. Others from a well-funded thesis. Akraya was born from something quieter: a belief that if you treated people with genuine care and showed up with discipline, trust would follow. That was 2001. The dot-com era was crumbling, optimism had a short shelf life, and Amar Panchal and Sonu Ratra launched a staffing company anyway, with one client and no guarantee of a second.

Twenty-five years later, Akraya employs more than 650 professionals, serves Fortune 500 enterprises globally, and has grown from workforce solutions into managed services spanning Data and AI, Product Engineering, UX Research, and Data Center Acceleration. None of that happened because of a pivot. It happened because the original instinct, earn trust before you spend it, turned out to be a remarkably durable strategy.

"When we started Akraya in 2001, we had one client and a conviction that treating people right, consistently, would be the only strategy we'd ever need."

-Sonu Ratra, Co-Founder

The Foundation

One client. One conviction. The rest followed.

The early years of Akraya were not a sprint toward scale. They were a long and deliberate accumulation of credibility. Client by client, candidate by candidate, the company built something that cannot be manufactured quickly: a reputation for following through. As enterprise needs shifted from filling roles to solving systemic challenges, Akraya moved in step, not by abandoning what it was, but by expanding what it could offer.

This organic growth is, by any measure, rare. Many staffing companies plateau or struggle when they try to cross into managed services, because the skills that win on volume are not the skills that win on complexity. Akraya threaded that needle by staying close to its clients through transitions, understanding their operating environments well enough to grow alongside them rather than chasing trends from a distance.

Culture and Values

3X Karma: the operating system behind the company

At some point in Akraya's journey, the team tried to articulate what had made the company work. The result was a framework they call 3X Karma: give more than what is asked, take ownership, and follow through completely. It sounds simple because it is. The difficulty is not understanding it. The difficulty is doing it every day, especially when things are hard.

This ethos shows up externally in how the company serves clients, and internally in how it treats the people who work there. The recognition tells part of that story: Glassdoor's Best Places to Work in the US, Silicon Valley's number one best workplace, the Stevie Awards, Inc. 5000 fastest-growing companies, and Fortune's recognition for exceptional employee perks. What the awards don't capture is the texture of a culture that genuinely lives what it preaches, or the reason those recognitions keep recurring.

"Our evolution reflects what our clients need us to become. As their challenges grew more complex, we evolved with them."

-Amar Panchal, CEO

Social Impact

Women Back to Work: a decade of a different kind of return

In 2015, Akraya launched Women Back to Work, a career re-entry program for experienced professionals who had stepped away from the workforce. The program was built on a conviction that the talent companies often overlook is not absent; it is simply waiting for the right door to open. Over the past decade, Women Back to Work has supported thousands of returning professionals while simultaneously giving enterprise clients access to a skilled, diverse talent pool they would not have found through conventional channels.

That alignment of social purpose and business value is not accidental. It is what Akraya means when it talks about impact. The program's tenth anniversary last year was a reminder that the most enduring programs are the ones that create genuine value on both sides of the equation.

Quiet confidence: The Foundation Was Always the Point

The world Akraya's clients operate in today looks nothing like 2001. AI is reshaping how enterprises think about data, products, and speed. Supply chains are more complex and more fragile than anyone anticipated. The definition of a technology partner has shifted from vendor to strategic extension of the client's own team. Akraya has been building toward exactly this moment, with delivery models that combine onshore advisory with offshore execution, and capabilities that span from AI and data to UX research and supply chain digitization.

What has not changed is the way Akraya approaches each engagement. Every client relationship is still treated as something to earn, not something to assume. That philosophy, forged in the uncertainty of a dot-com collapse, has held through bull markets, recessions, a pandemic, and now an era of artificial intelligence. It has proven more resilient than any particular service line or market position.

Twenty-five years is worth celebrating. For Akraya, it is also a moment of honest reflection on how this chapter closes and what the next one demands. The foundation is strong precisely because it was never built on anything that couldn't last.

Akraya Inc. is a global managed services and talent solutions company headquartered in San Francisco, California. Founded in 2001, Akraya serves Fortune 500 enterprises across the US and globally, with services spanning Data and AI, Product Engineering, UX research, and Supply Chain digitization.