Prashanth Tondapu, our Founder & CEO, started his career as a software engineer at McAfee in Bangalore. He worked on the VirusScan team and later on the e-commerce platform behind home.mcafee.com. In 2010, he was part of the engineering team that handled the 5958 DAT crisis—a faulty virus definition update that crashed Windows XP systems globally. McAfee’s executive staff recognized him for his work during the incident.
After McAfee, Prashanth joined Advisory Board Company (now part of Optum) as their first India-based developer for a product they were building the Indian team for. He built a reputation as someone who delivered consistently and could be trusted with critical work.
That’s when he realized something: if his approach to engineering through ownership, transparency, and speed wasn’t common, he should make it the standard.
That insight became Innostax.