Rajiv Anand

Founder, CEO & Board Member Quartic.ai

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Rajiv Anand is the founder and chief executive of Quartic.ai, and sits on its board. Quartic sells decision intelligence for manufacturing: software that takes the streams of data already coming off plant equipment and turns them into real-time operating decisions, with the aim of raising yield, cutting variability and lifting throughput. Its customers are process manufacturers — life sciences, chemicals, consumer packaged goods, food and beverage — where the product is made by a continuous or batch process rather than assembled, and where the difference between a good and a bad batch is buried in sensor data nobody has time to read. Anand spent around three decades inside that world as an automation engineer, most of it in the Emerson ecosystem, before concluding that the problems he kept meeting were not going to be solved by the incumbents and leaving to build the answer himself.

Career Highlights

• Founder and chief executive of Quartic.ai, and a member of its board, working alongside co-founders responsible for product and for architecture.
• Built the company around manufacturing operations management, industrial DataOps and multivariate analytics, deliberately targeting regulated process industries rather than discrete manufacturing.
• Spent around three decades in industrial automation, implementing process control and asset health solutions across power, mining, pharmaceutical and chemical plants.
• Held key engineering, management and leadership positions at Emerson and with Emerson’s impact partners, working extensively with its process automation platforms.
• Began his career at Siemens.
• Took a full year between leaving industry and founding Quartic to research industrial AI and machine learning, and to advise technology companies and manufacturers on digital manufacturing strategy.
• Attracted investment from Celesta Capital and ZS, with Michael Marks, the former chief executive of Flextronics, serving as both investor and board member.
• Interviewed by Global Business Reports in 2025 on the role of AI in pharmaceutical manufacturing’s digital evolution.
• Writes publicly on manufacturing operations management and on treating variability as a source of agility rather than a defect.

Professional Journey

Anand trained as an engineer at the Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology in the early 1980s and went into industrial automation, the discipline concerned with making physical processes run reliably without a human hand on every valve. He began his career at Siemens.

The bulk of his working life was spent in the Emerson ecosystem, where he held engineering, management and leadership positions both at Emerson and with its impact partners. The work was hands-on and sector-spanning: implementing process control and asset health systems for power stations, mines, pharmaceutical plants and chemical works. That is an unusually broad exposure, and it is the reason his later product thinking is grounded in plant reality rather than in data science abstraction.

It also produced his founding insight, which he has described plainly: he knew what needed solving and could not solve it with the tools available, and he judged that large companies would not move fast enough to do it. Rather than jump straight into a venture, he took a year to study industrial AI and machine learning properly and to advise technology companies and manufacturers on digital manufacturing strategy, before founding Quartic.ai.

The company’s path since has not been a straight line for him personally. In May 2022 Quartic brought in David Hsieh, a technology executive from the Cisco and Webex world, as chief executive, with Anand moving to a founder’s role leading product, data science strategy and strategic relationships. At some point after that the arrangement ended, and Quartic’s own site today presents Anand as founder and chief executive once more, as well as a board member, with no reference to his successor.

Under his leadership the product has consolidated around three pillars — industrial DataOps, advanced multivariate analytics for batch and process monitoring, and integration with the cloud data platforms customers already run — and around the pharmaceutical sector in particular, where digital transformation is pitched as a way of accelerating drug pipelines by cutting workload and lifting efficiency. He remains a visible advocate for the view that industrial AI is about equipping people with better data and faster decisions rather than displacing them.

Education

Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology

Bachelor of Engineering, 1981-1985