Shrikant Acharya

Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder Excelfore Corporation

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Shrikant Acharya is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Excelfore Corporation, a Fremont, California company that builds the software layer connecting vehicles to the cloud — over-the-air update systems, in-vehicle networking on automotive Ethernet, and the data paths that let a manufacturer change a car after it has been sold. He also holds the two senior offices of the eSync Alliance, the trade association formed in 2018 to standardise automotive OTA updates and diagnostics, serving as both its President and Chair of a board drawn from Molex, Hella, JOYNEXT, Aptiv, Texas Instruments and Arm. That dual position is the significant fact about him: he is simultaneously building a commercial product and chairing the industry body defining the standard it implements, which places him unusually close to the centre of how software updates reach production vehicles.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Excelfore and serves as its Chief Technology Officer, setting the technology roadmap for its in-vehicle and cloud-to-vehicle connectivity products.
• Excelfore was the first software supplier to achieve independent certification by the Avnu Alliance, the body that certifies interoperability for audio-video bridging and time-sensitive networking.
• President and Chair of the Board of the eSync Alliance, the non-profit automotive trade association formed in 2018 by five suppliers to standardise over-the-air updates and diagnostics.
• Holds more than a dozen patents covering cloud technology, in-vehicle networks, advanced compression and driver assistance systems.
• Co-founded MARGI Systems, which pioneered infotainment head units for automotive manufacturers.
• Served as Chief Technology Officer at Harman, the automotive audio and connected car supplier.
• Earlier engineering roles at Widergren Communications, Cirrus Logic and Telephoto Communications.

Professional Journey

Acharya trained as an engineer at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science in Pilani and took an MSEE at the University of Texas at Arlington, then worked through a sequence of companies at the hardware and signal-processing end of consumer and communications electronics — Telephoto Communications, Cirrus Logic and Widergren Communications. That grounding in compression and low-level systems is visible in his patent portfolio, which spans compression technology alongside networking and driver assistance.

He co-founded MARGI Systems, which pioneered infotainment head units for automotive manufacturers at a point when the head unit was becoming the vehicle’s primary computing surface, and later served as Chief Technology Officer at Harman, one of the major suppliers in automotive audio and connected car systems. Between them these gave him a supplier’s-eye view of the automotive industry: long qualification cycles, conservative manufacturers, and electronics that must work unchanged for a decade.

Excelfore was founded on the recognition that this last assumption had broken. Vehicles now ship with software that must be updated in the field, across dozens of electronic control units from different suppliers, without bricking a car or opening a security hole. Excelfore’s products address that problem at two levels: the in-vehicle network, where the company works in automotive Ethernet AVB and TSN and became the first software supplier independently certified by the Avnu Alliance, and the cloud-to-vehicle link that carries updates and telemetry. The company describes itself as a market leader in both.

Standardisation is the other half of the strategy, and it is where his eSync Alliance role sits. The Alliance was formed in 2018 by five automotive suppliers who concluded that OTA updating could not be solved company by company; it published version 1.0 of its specification in early 2019, with the first production vehicles using eSync arriving that year. Acharya is its President and Chair of the Board, working alongside directors from Molex, Hella, JOYNEXT, Aptiv, Texas Instruments and Arm.

Education

Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, India

Bachelor’s degree

University of Texas at Arlington

MSEE