Chike Agbai

Founder & CEO Azumo

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Chike Agbai founded Azumo in 2016 after nearly twenty years as an investment banker covering enterprise software, a career in which he advised on more than $100 billion of transaction volume and worked with companies including Oracle, Salesforce and Dell. That background is the unusual part of the story: he spent two decades analysing software businesses from the outside, at the level of valuation and strategic fit, before building one. His stated reason for crossing over was a view about timing rather than technology - that the convergence of big data, cloud computing and mobility had put intelligent applications within reach of companies that could never previously have afforded to build them. Azumo is the firm he built to serve exactly those companies, combining nearshore engineering teams in South America, aligned to United States working hours, with a practice now positioned around AI-native development. Its clients range from startups to Meta, Zynga, Discovery Channel, Twitter and UnitedHealth.

Career Highlights

• Spent nearly two decades as a Wall Street investment banker covering enterprise software, advising on more than $100 billion in transaction volume for companies including Oracle, Salesforce and Dell.
• Founded Azumo in 2016 and has led it as CEO since.
• Built the firm into a multi-million-dollar business with clients including Meta, Zynga, Omnicom, Take-Two, UnitedHealth, Twitter and Discovery Channel, alongside startups and mid-market enterprises.
• Established a nearshore delivery model built on engineering teams in South America, principally Argentina, working in United States business hours to allow real-time collaboration rather than overnight handoff.
• Took the company through SOC 2 compliance in August 2023, a prerequisite for enterprise and regulated customers.
• Repositioned Azumo as an AI-native development firm, with engineers building with AI to compress delivery timelines, and shipped in-house products including Valkyrie, a REST API for reaching multiple AI models, the Charli voice assistant, and an AI receptionist.
• Publishes regularly on applied and generative AI and on engineering management through the company’s blog.

Professional Journey

Agbai took a degree at Stanford and then spent the bulk of his working life in investment banking, covering the enterprise software sector. The work was advisory at the top of the market - mergers, acquisitions and financings for the largest software companies in the world, including Oracle, Salesforce and Dell - and across nearly twenty years he advised on more than $100 billion of transaction volume. The vantage point is a specific one. Bankers covering a sector see the full spread of it, which company is buying what capability and why, which strategies are being validated by capital and which are quietly being abandoned.

What he concluded from it, by his own account, was that three trends were converging - big data, cloud computing and mobility - in a way that made intelligent applications economically feasible for companies far below the scale of the ones he had been advising. Building such an application used to require a research budget and a data centre. By the mid-2010s it required an engineering team that knew what it was doing, and most mid-market companies did not have one and could not hire one in San Francisco at a rational price.

Azumo, founded in 2016, was his answer to that constraint. The firm is headquartered in San Francisco with engineering delivered from nearshore locations in South America, principally Argentina, and the operative word is nearshore rather than offshore: the teams work United States hours, which means a client’s engineers and Azumo’s are in the same working day and can collaborate rather than exchange overnight handoffs. That is the same structural argument other Latin American development firms make, and the differentiator Agbai has pursued is capability rather than geography, concentrating the practice on data engineering, mobile, game development and, increasingly, applied AI.

The company grew into a multi-million-dollar business with an unusually broad client list for its size, spanning startups and mid-market firms alongside Meta, Zynga, Omnicom, Take-Two, UnitedHealth, Twitter and Discovery Channel. Serving enterprises of that kind imposes its own requirements, and Azumo achieved SOC 2 compliance in August 2023. More recently Agbai has repositioned the firm around AI-native development, the claim being not only that Azumo builds AI products for clients but that its own engineers build with AI to deliver faster. That has been accompanied by a set of in-house products - Valkyrie, a REST API layer for accessing multiple AI models through one interface; Charli, a voice assistant; and an AI receptionist for front-desk work - which function both as revenue lines and as demonstrations of the practice. He writes frequently on the subject, with blog pieces on generative AI in creative work and on managing engineering teams for outcomes rather than activity.

Education

Stanford University

Azumo’s own biography states only that he holds a degree from Stanford University. No degree type, field of study or year appears in any source consulted.