Summary
In this episode Shravan Gunda, founder and CEO of Kaarvi AI, talks about building an AI-native, agent-driven data platform designed to eliminate the janitorial work that consumes most data teams. He explores Kaarvi’s multi-agent architecture that runs queries across seven LLMs in parallel for reliability, its synthetic data generator that mirrors source schemas for quick testing, and “Hey Kaarvi” chat for text-to-SQL, text-to-transformations, and text-to-dashboard workflows. He also digs into on-prem versus SaaS deployments, domain-specialized agents for privacy and accuracy, code blocks for custom Python/SQL, and the roadmap for a marketplace and desktop assistant. Shravan highlights how Kaarvi compresses weeks of work into hours and bridges the gap between business users and data engineers by turning AI into a dependable force multiplier.
Announcements
- Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
- This episode is sponsored by DataDriven.io, the free data engineering interview prep platform built by data engineers for data engineers. Ever walked into a data engineering interview and gotten a question that has nothing to do with real data engineering work? Interviewing is its own skill, separate from the job. Watch your code execute live, inspect Spark internals, and whiteboard your data models and pipelines and defend your decisions. Unlike SQL-only or Python-only practice, DataDriven.io covers the full interview loop: star schemas, slowly changing dimensions, grain and fact table design, idempotency, watermarks, dead letter queues, change data capture, and backpressure. Every question comes from real Data Engineer interview loops at Google, Amazon, Meta, Stripe, Databricks, Netflix, and Airbnb. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datadriven today to start practicing.
- Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Shravan Gunda about building an agent-driven data platform at Kaarvi
Interview
- Introduction
- How did you get involved in the area of data management?
- Can you describe what Kaarvi is and the story behind it?
- "AI" is a very broad term that encompasses numerous possible implementations. Can you give some more detail about the different types and applications of AI in Kaarvi's architecture?
- What are some of the core assumptions of data workflows that need to be reconsidered when AI is embedded in the execution path?
- What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Kaarvi used?
- What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Kaarvi?
- When is Kaarvi the wrong choice?
- What do you have planned for the future of Kaarvi?
Contact Info
Parting Question
- From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?
Closing Announcements
- Thank you for listening! Don't forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.__init__ covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The AI Engineering Podcast is your guide to the fast-moving world of building AI systems.
- Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes.
- If you've learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email hosts@dataengineeringpodcast.com with your story.
Links
The intro and outro music is from
The Hug by
The Freak Fandango Orchestra /
CC BY-SA
