Ex Microsoft APAC President Launches kAIgentic With $10 Mn Funding To Build AI For Global Enterprises

kAIgentic will build autonomous, accountable AI agents for global enterprises, beginning with SMBC Group as its first customer.

Ahmed Mazhari, former President of Microsoft Asia Pacific, has launched kAIgentic, an agentic AI venture founded in strategic partnership with SMBC Group, one of Japan’s largest financial groups, with $10 Mn in funding.

Headquartered in Singapore with core engineering operations in India, kAIgentic is building AI deployment infrastructure for large-scale enterprise operations. The company will begin by deploying its platform within SMBC Group, allowing its systems to be developed and tested inside live banking workflows before expanding to other complex global enterprises.

kAIgentic is focused on one of the core challenges in enterprise AI: moving from experimentation to safe, governed deployment. The platform is designed to capture the unwritten, day-to-day operational logic of how work gets done inside large enterprises and use that context to build domain-specific AI agents. These agents run in production with continuous human supervision, governance, and accountability.

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“The bet behind kAIgentic is that enterprise AI will be won not by model access alone, but by the application layer that turns AI into governed operations,” said Ahmed Mazhari, Founder and CEO, kAIgentic. “The bottleneck in enterprise AI is no longer model capability. It is whether large organisations can absorb intelligence into their most critical operations, at speed, with the standards and policies they must maintain.”

The launch comes as enterprise AI moves from pilots to production-first, workflow-native systems. According to Inc42’s Bharat AI Startups Report 2026, India’s AI market is projected to cross $126 Bn by 2030, with enterprise AI expected to grow from $11 Bn to $71 Bn by the end of the decade.

kAIgentic’s partnership with SMBC Group gives the company a high-stakes enterprise environment to validate its platform from day one. The structure is designed to create value at three levels: supporting AI transformation within SMBC Group, serving SMBC Group’s customers, and building a platform that can generalise beyond the bank to other regulated and complex enterprises.

SMBC Group recently announced a three-year IT investment of approximately JPY 1 Tn in April 2026 to modernise its IT infrastructure and accelerate AI adoption. This includes strengthening talent, upgrading the operating environment, expanding employee training, and establishing AI-native business processes.

kAIgentic’s model combines the institutional depth of a global financial group with the speed and product focus of an independent platform company. The company has an independent board and is being built to serve enterprises beyond SMBC Group.

Mazhari brings more than three decades of enterprise technology leadership to kAIgentic. Before founding the company, he served as President of Microsoft APAC, where he helped build the foundation for AI deployment across the region. Earlier, he was part of the founding team at Genpact and later served as its Chief Growth Officer.

kAIgentic is hiring engineering talent in India to build production-grade AI systems for banking and other complex enterprise environments, where reliability, governance, security, and human oversight are critical.

Once proven within banking operations, kAIgentic plans to scale its platform across adjacent regulated and complex sectors, including healthcare, consumer packaged goods, retail, and telecommunications.

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