Vijay Oddiraju

Co-founder & CEO Volante Technologies

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Vijay Oddiraju co-founded Volante Technologies in 2001 and has led it as Chief Executive Officer ever since — twenty-five unbroken years running a company he started, which is rare in enterprise software and rarer still in financial infrastructure. Volante sells cloud payments and financial-messaging software to banks, market infrastructures, clearing houses and corporate treasuries. Its market is payments modernisation, a category defined by a difficult constraint: the batch-based systems that still move most of the world’s money are decades old, brittle and impossible to switch off, so the replacement has to happen underneath a live service. Volante’s answer has been to abstract the message formats — the ISO 20022 transition, SWIFT, domestic clearing schemes — so a bank can change its plumbing without rewriting its applications. The company employs roughly 800 people across nine offices from a Jersey City headquarters, and has taken $116 million in outside investment, much of it from the banks and card networks it sells to.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Volante Technologies in 2001 with Uday Thakur and Venkat Malla and has led it as Chief Executive Officer for over two decades; both co-founders remain in post, as Chief Technology Officer and Chief Information Officer.
• Raised $66 million in debt and equity in November 2023 led by Sixth Street Growth, with Wavecrest Growth Partners and Wells Fargo Strategic Capital participating, taking total outside investment to $116 million.
• Assembled a strategic investor base from Volante’s own customer industry, including BNY Mellon, Citi, Poste Italiane and Visa Ventures.
• Grew the company to roughly 800 employees across nine global offices, headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.
• Co-founded the standards-based middleware company GlueBeans in 1995 with Uday Thakur, merged it into NextSet Software, and served as NextSet’s Chief Strategy Officer.
• Began his career as a consultant in Oracle’s consulting division, working with enterprise customers on technology modernisation.
• Positioned Volante early on both the ISO 20022 messaging migration and cloud-native payments-as-a-service, the two changes now driving bank payment-system replacement.

Professional Journey

Oddiraju studied engineering in India and then took a master’s degree in computer science in the United States. He began his career in Oracle’s consulting division, spending roughly six years working with enterprise customers on how to modernise complicated technology estates — which is, in substance, the same problem he has worked on ever since, just at a different layer.

In 1995 he left to found GlueBeans with Uday Thakur. GlueBeans built standards-based middleware, software whose job is to let systems that were never designed to talk to each other exchange data reliably. That is the intellectual foundation of everything Volante does. GlueBeans merged with NextSet Software, and Oddiraju stayed on as NextSet’s Chief Strategy Officer.

He and Thakur founded Volante in 2001, joined by Venkat Malla, with a market observation that proved unusually durable: financial services runs on message formats, those formats change constantly and incompatibly, and the cost of keeping up falls on institutions whose core systems cannot be touched without risk. Volante’s early product was data transformation and integration for financial messaging. As the industry moved, so did the product — through SWIFT standards, domestic clearing schemes, real-time payment rails and, most consequentially, the ISO 20022 migration that has required essentially every significant bank to rework how it represents a payment.

The second strategic shift was to the cloud. Volante moved from selling software a bank installs to offering payments-as-a-service, which changed both the economics and the buyer: a mid-tier bank that could never have staffed a payments modernisation programme can subscribe to one. That repositioning is what the November 2023 funding was raised to accelerate. Sixth Street Growth led a $66 million round of debt and equity, with Wavecrest Growth Partners and Wells Fargo Strategic Capital participating, earmarked for international expansion and for selling further down-market into mid-tier institutions. It brought total outside investment to $116 million, on top of earlier strategic money from BNY Mellon, Citi, Poste Italiane and Visa Ventures — an investor list which is also, in effect, a reference list.

Volante today employs roughly 800 people across nine global offices. The founding team has stayed together: Thakur and Malla, who started the company with Oddiraju, are still its CTO and CIO.

Education

Secondary sources state that Vijay Oddiraju studied engineering in India and subsequently earned a master’s degree in computer science in the United States. No source located names either institution, including Volante’s own leadership page, which publishes no biography. The degrees are therefore described here but not recorded as verified education entries.