Hariharan Kolam

Co-Founder and CEO Findem

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Hariharan Kolam — Hari to almost everyone, including his own company’s website — is co-founder and chief executive of Findem, a talent intelligence platform built on the premise that hiring is a data problem that the industry has persistently treated as a search problem. He is an infrastructure engineer by background, with roughly two decades spent on systems that move and interpret large volumes of data: database internals at Aster Data, then content delivery and web performance at Instart, which he co-founded and served as chief technology officer, and where he co-authored more than fifty patents. Findem came directly out of the frustration of that second job. Scaling Instart meant hiring constantly, and Kolam concluded that the reason recruiters could not find the right people was not effort but representation — a résumé is a poor encoding of a career, and keyword search over résumés is a poor query language for potential.

Career Highlights

• Co-founder and chief executive of Findem, working alongside co-founder and chief technology officer Raghu Venkat.
• Built a talent intelligence platform that, by the company’s account, draws on 1.6 trillion data points from more than 100,000 sources to let recruiters search by intent rather than by keyword.
• Co-founder and chief technology officer of Instart, the web performance and content delivery company founded in 2012 with Manav Mital and Raghu Ramakrishnan.
• Co-author of more than fifty technology patents, the majority from his Instart years, in web performance and content delivery.
• Earlier engineering work at Aster Data spanning the full development stack, from kernel to business intelligence.
• Findem named to the Inc. 5000 for a third consecutive year and recognised in the 2026 Lighthouse Tech Awards for talent acquisition.

Professional Journey

Kolam’s career began in deep infrastructure. At Aster Data, the analytic database company later acquired by Teradata, he worked across the entire development stack — by his own description everything from the kernel upward to the business intelligence layer. That is an unusual range, and it is the technical grounding for everything after: both of the companies he has co-founded are, underneath the product, large-scale data systems.

In 2012 he co-founded Instart, originally Instart Logic, with Manav Mital and Raghu Ramakrishnan, and served as its chief technology officer. Instart attacked web performance from an angle the incumbent content delivery networks had not: rather than simply caching content closer to users, it split application delivery between the network and a client-side component, which allowed it to make decisions about what to send and when based on the actual state of the browser. The founders came out of Google and Aster Data, and the company built a substantial patent portfolio, more than fifty of which carry Kolam’s name. Instart did not end well — the business wound down around the turn of the decade and its technology passed to another operator — but the technical work and the hiring experience both carried forward.

It was that hiring experience that produced Findem. Scaling an engineering organisation at Instart, Kolam found the bottleneck was not interviewing capacity but identification: the tools available could match strings in documents, and what he wanted was to describe a kind of person and have the system find them. His reframing was that talent sourcing is fundamentally a data problem, tractable with deep learning if you assemble enough of the right data and represent careers as trajectories rather than as documents. Findem’s product builds what it calls three-dimensional talent attributes across an enormous ingested corpus, so that a recruiter can express an intent — the shape of an experience, not a job title — and get candidates who match it. Sourcing, candidate relationship management and analytics sit in one system, with generative AI woven through the workflows rather than bolted on, and with the proprietary data layer used specifically to keep the model grounded.

Kolam leads the company as chief executive with Raghu Venkat as chief technology officer, and a leadership team covering product and strategy, marketing, people and finance. Findem has been named to the Inc. 5000 for three consecutive years and was recognised in the 2026 Lighthouse Tech Awards for talent acquisition. Kolam speaks regularly on hiring and talent technology, including at SHRM conferences, and frames the company’s mission in terms of understanding how experience shapes potential — a formulation that reflects the original engineering insight rather than dressing it up.

Education

Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, Nagpur

Bachelor’s degree, Computer Science

Stony Brook University

Master’s degree, Computer Science

No graduation years are published in any source located.