The Entrepreneurial Engineer Behind Kalos' AI Marketing Platform The company primarily focuses on LinkedIn ads, a key pillar for most enterprise marketing budgets.

The best engineers are able to translate thorough research into products, balance technical knowledge with market sense, and shape systems that scale from prototype to production.

Pranav Pawar belongs to that generation. From a small-town student who first discovered programming in borrowed computer labs to a national hackathon winner, he's moved through research labs, venture firms, and healthcare startups, refining over time his instinct for what technology can realistically deliver. Now, as a founding engineer at Kalos, he's developing agents that automate how B2B companies design and manage their marketing campaigns.

Getting His Engineering Start Through Hackathons

Growing up in a small Indian town, Pawar encountered computers only briefly, using them mostly to watch movies. The real transformation began just before college in 2017, when he taught himself C++ and realized coding was essentially a form of logic expressed through mathematics. This early self-study led him to the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.

He spent the next three years competing in data science hackathons, using them as a testing ground for new algorithms and ideas.

He wound up winning four nationwide hackathons: Goldman Sachs Quantify, Gartner HackElite, Microsoft CodeFunDo, and AmEx Ignite — achievements that gave him the confidence to continue developing his engineering skills.

Entering the World of AI Research and Real-World Applications

By his final year, Pawar was ready to move beyond data competitions. He joined a stealth NLP startup in Cupertino as its first engineer, working remotely from India while finishing his degree. His role was to train models to answer user questions with accurate information, which would help banks automatically address all customer interactions.

The startup entrusted him with more than engineering; he soon began hiring fresh graduates from IIT Madras and IIT Guwahati to expand the team, managing projects and helping new hires onboard.

After graduation, he earned a master's degree in artificial intelligence at Northwestern University in Illinois, where he deepened his focus on research-driven applications of AI. During this time, he co-authored a paper on emphasis detection in speech, an exploration of how machine learning could help people with hearing impairments better interpret tone and stress — a study that was later presented at the 2024 ICASSP.

At the same time, he began working with venture-scale problem solving through Bain Capital Ventures, where he interned and later joined full-time. His work there focused on building tools that could analyze investment data like founder networks and deal-room intelligence, helping investors uncover patterns that traditional methods might not acknowledge.

But Pawar wasn't interested in staying confined to labs. He discovered he preferred the fast-changing challenges of small teams to the structured pace of academia. "Startups need people who can take on things that are unclear," he explains. "I like making things work first — and then making them beautiful."

Diving Deeper Into The Startup World

That mindset proved essential when Pawar began working for the healthcare AI startup ClarityCare, where he built a prior-authorization platform from the ground up. The system sought to help nurses automate medical claims processing, giving critical personnel a faster way to handle paperwork.

This work taught him how even a promising algorithm must contend with the realities of regulation and patient data. It was, as he later described, "a mix of deep engineering and learning how to earn trust in a field that doesn't forgive mistakes."

That project's momentum gave him the confidence to start a venture on his own. Backed by $400,000 in pre-seed funding, Pawar began exploring how AI could streamline the insurance claim approval process, which has been notoriously slow and vulnerable to human error.

But after early pilots, his team made the difficult choice to pivot, and eventually wound down the effort. Looking back, Pawar describes that period as the point where he learned the importance of restraint — that successful projects don't always come from big, flashy ideas, but from improving the systems people already rely on.

Developing Marketing Agents At Kalos

Now, Pawar is putting that belief to work as one of the founding engineers at Kalos, a startup building AI-powered systems for B2B marketing.

The company primarily focuses on LinkedIn ads, a key pillar for most enterprise marketing budgets. Kalos' agents connect directly with a client's outreach channels, interpret target audiences and value propositions, then generate ad copy, imagery, and experiments in bulk. Over a typical 30-day cycle, the agents run hundreds of A/B tests, look into how people engage with different campaigns, and pinpoint the best-performing combinations.

"Marketers can't run fifty campaigns at once, but AI can," Pawar said. "Our agents learn from CRM insights, generate and test ads, and surface what works best. It's like giving every marketing team a tireless assistant."

Inside the company, Pawar's work stretches across the full stack. He builds and scales the platform's infrastructure, refactors early prototypes into production-ready systems, and develops features that make the product self-serve so clients can launch fully developed campaigns without hand-holding. One of his current projects is an "ad studio" — a Figma-style workspace that lets users visually edit campaigns while an assistant makes real-time adjustments behind the scenes.

But even as enthusiasm around AI grows, Pawar remains cautious about full autonomy. He believes AI is best used when giving humans better tools to support human decision-making instead of outright displacing them, a philosophy he maintains throughout his work. "An effective agent still keeps the human in the loop," he said. "The best systems give marketers control while letting automation handle the scale."

A Vision Beyond Code

Over the next few years, Pranav Pawar aims to grow into an engineering leader who can help grow Kalos from an early-stage startup into a category-defining company. Eventually, he hopes to return to founding another venture, this time armed with deeper experience in understanding markets, building products, and managing teams.

He points to a future where small and medium-sized businesses operate with AI that can properly manage everything from marketing to customer outreach, freeing founders to focus on creativity and strategy — and through his work in companies like Kalos, he aims to be part of that shift.

In his own words, "AI agents are here to stay for the long run. That's why I wish to spend all my time and energy building incredible agents that do wonders and feel like magic."