Nav Kumar is an AI-focused entrepreneur, the CEO, and co-founder of Ungate, the decentralized AI-OS of Swarm Intelligence, and an AVS on EigenLayer. ^[1][2]

Education

Kumar graduated from Bharathiar University with a BE in Information Technology in 2004. He later attended a General Assembly course on Digital Product Management and participated in the GrowthX marketing strategies course. ^[3]

Career

Kumar began his career at Oracle in June 2004 as a senior consultant, providing digital consulting services across various global clients. His role involved full-stack development, digital architecture, and product management. In November 2011, he was promoted to principal consultant at Oracle, focusing on digital transformation and architecture. He later served as a Digital Architect from June 2013, leading digital projects. In February 2014, Kumar took on the role of head of digital products at Oracle, where he led digital change initiatives within organizations and worked on several high-profile projects, including the People Transformation Programme at Tesco, the NewVo Transformation Programme at Vodafone, and others at Barclaycard, National Grid, and Unisys. ^[4]

Kumar joined Lloyds Banking Group in June 2018 as an innovation lead in the Transaction Banking business. He focused on developing product strategies related to banking marketplaces and blockchain. In October 2019, he became head of product discovery at Nationwide for Business, working on product strategy, discovery, and roadmap development. In November 2020, he founded Natyam.co.uk, an e-commerce store bringing Indian brands to the UK. Concurrently, he worked as a product director at Lloyds Banking Group from December 2020, where he led the development of business insights products. From March 2021 to March 2022, he served as a product consultant at Throdle Inc., a seed-funded AutoTech startup, defining product strategy and coaching the team on the Lean Startup approach. ^[4]

Kumar co-founded Metaphy Labs in March 2022, a B2B startup in the metaverse and AI space. He served as Chief Product Officer until February 2024. In August 2023, he founded Astroware AI, a strategy consultancy focused on helping enterprises adopt AI using a tailored training and experimentation framework. His tenure there lasted until May 2024. From January 2024, Kumar took on multiple roles: he became a startup mentor at AI Forge and Outlier Ventures, a founding team member at BananaSZN, and head of partnerships at Crypto Mondays London. In April 2024, he joined FigFinder AI Limited as a strategic advisor. By June 2024, he co-founded Ungate, where he currently serves as CEO, working on building a decentralized AI platform. ^[4]

Interviews

AI and Blockchain

After presenting a masterclass in blockchain and AI, Kumar talked with CoinGeek about how blockchain and AI can reinforce each other, starting with explaining what his company, Commun Flow, was: ^[5]

“So, Commun Flow is a community CRM. What we are building is the HubSpot for communities, and the thesis is that community-led marketing is the next wave of marketing. Today, many organizations are trying to build active communities around their products, but it is very fragmented. People are spread across multiple channels like Discord, Twitter, Telegram, WhatsApp, and others. What we are doing is building the tooling to bring all these people together in one place to manage them, understand their behaviors, and incentivize behaviors that lead to better engagement, growth, and brand loyalty.”

He then discussed his background in AI and blockchain and explained why he was chosen to present the masterclass: ^[5]

“I'm involved in several things. One is being part of a larger DAO called BananaSZN, which focuses on using Web3 and communities to empower various Web3 projects. I'm also a mentor at Outlier Ventures, the world's biggest Web3 accelerator. I started my career with Oracle, a data company, where I worked on predictive tasks involving AI in its early stages. Eventually, I ended up in the blockchain space, bringing together a lot of different experiences.”

During the masterclass, Kumar pointed out that AI and blockchain are involved with economies of scale. When asked to elaborate in the interview, he responded: ^[5]

“With AI and blockchain, we're creating an Industrial Revolution moment for knowledge work. This allows us to bring together people who are engaged in creating content and knowledge to collaborate. We aim to incentivize this collaboration in a way that enables coordination on a scale not previously possible. This is reflected in the hockey stick curve you saw, where coordinated behaviors lead to value creation and exchange.”

He then provided a few examples of how AI helps blockchain: ^[5]

“There are multiple ways AI can be used to simplify blockchain. For example, in smart contract development, people currently create contracts on a case-by-case basis, which leaves room for errors and mismanagement. If smart contracts aren't written correctly, they can result in higher gas fees or vulnerabilities, with assets potentially being used for nefarious purposes. AI can automate the creation and optimization of smart contracts, reducing these risks.”

“The second use case involves optimizing rollups, such as ZK (zero-knowledge) rollups, across different chains. AI can be used to enhance the processing and optimization of these rollups. There are multiple emerging use cases for this. Conversely, blockchain can also enhance AI in various ways, such as through decentralized identities. This allows people to own their data and selectively share it to benefit from AI-generated recommendations. On centralized platforms like Amazon, data is used for recommendations and targeted advertising, often for items people may not want. With decentralized identities, users control their data and can decide when to share it, enabling AI to make privacy-preserving recommendations that align with their preferences. This combination of blockchain and decentralized identities with AI offers greater control over what is recommended to users.”

He also shared use cases of AI in finance: ^[5]

“In a world where digital money and decentralized finance are prevalent, there are specific use cases, such as peer-to-peer lending networks, where AI could play a crucial role. AI can act as an agent to score individuals borrowing money, ensuring that in a setup without a centralized authority to underwrite loans or assess risk, the right predictions are made. This allows for a proper understanding of risk and ensures that borrowers are charged appropriate interest rates based on the risk they pose to the system. This is one potential use case for AI in decentralized finance.”

“In decentralized insurance, where communities form to participate in an insurance scheme, AI can be used to provide proper underwriting. It can calculate premiums based on the risk each individual poses to the insurance community. This mirrors the role that a centralized organization would typically play, but instead, AI handles the underwriting process.”