Investors have long favored product companies over service firms because products offer non-linear scalability, whereas service growth is limited by the speed of hiring personnel. However, Satya Pramod, former CFO of Tally Solutions, believes that AI-based service companies are ready to break this rule.
In an interview with Shraddha Sharma, founder and CEO of YourStory and The Bharat Project, the certified accountant explained why he renamed his Bengaluru-based consultancy firm, KayEss Square, to Northbound Advisors. He also discussed plans to raise a larger funding round to acquire smaller firms and serve them all using AI.
Pramod's viewpoint is unusual. Before becoming a consultant, he worked at Deloitte and EY, managed finances for AOL International across 32 countries, and held positions as CFO and head of legal and tax departments at Tally, one of India's most well-known software companies. In 2017, he co-founded the consultancy firm with Tally's former Head of Legal, Shivadutt Bannanje, after observing the collapse of promising startups they invested in due to neglected regulatory compliance and financial discipline.
Since then, the firm has collaborated with about 250 companies, providing services in CFO consulting, due diligence, transaction advisory, legal, taxation, and risk management. About six months ago, it raised 10 crore rupees in a pre-Series A round led by Vakil Housing.
The limitation Pramod attacks has existed as long as the profession itself. He asked, 'There is only one partner, and this partner has 10-12 hours a day. How can we serve 25 different companies?' Five years ago, he said he regularly turned away clients because time was his only resource. With AI taking on a significant portion of the work, this resource expands, and partners' working time shifts from direct production to personal client interaction.
The firm is developing its own AI-based tool with a partner trained on eight years of experience in due diligence, CFO consulting, legal, taxation, and risk projects. Pramod clearly explains why they are not just using off-the-shelf models. He notes that clients fear their data being made publicly available, where competitors could benefit, so the firm creates an internal ecosystem where client data remains protected, while base models, whether from Anthropic or others, provide the same results. They currently have no plans to monetize this tool as a product; the goal is to provide services at scale.
This is where the M&A strategy comes into play. The planned larger fundraising will allow Northbound to acquire 8-10 firms in adjacent fields, instantly adding one to two hundred clients who will be served through the AI-supported platform. The firm is also expanding its legal practice by bringing in several partners who recently left major law firms, as well as a global center of excellence practice to be led by a senior specialist from one of the Big Four. Pramod is careful with positioning: Northbound does not intend to compete with the Big Four but aims at the early-stage small and medium business market, which they cannot profitably serve due to their cost structure.
According to Pramod, being AI-oriented does not just mean adding a chatbot to an existing practice. It means designing the firm's service delivery model around AI from the outset, so that knowledge accumulated across hundreds of projects transforms into reusable infrastructure rather than remaining locked in individual partners' heads. The practical difference is seen in throughput. A traditional firm increases revenue by hiring qualified specialists, which is a slow and expensive process. An AI-oriented firm can take on more clients per partner because routine analysis, documentation, and compliance work are increasingly automated, leaving humans with decision-making, negotiation, and trust tasks.
Shraddha noted the implication for investors: service firms are reinventing themselves, and there is now a faster way to scale a service business—a quality historically reserved for product companies.
None of this weakens Pramod's diagnosis of the real situation for Indian founders. He stated that regulatory compliance, cash flow, and accounting according to global standards remain the most ignored aspects, and he has seen good companies fail due to neglect of these areas. He also spoke frankly about the environment: 'Doing business in India is not a joke,' emphasizing that despite schemes like Mudra loans, banks rarely begin engagement without three years of experience.
The broader question raised by his experiment is whether India can finally create its own consulting institutions with global ambitions—a gap he attributes to an era when scalability, leadership, and best practices were the property of Western firms. As information is now democratized, and AI lowers the cost of service delivery, this barrier is eroding. If Northbound's fundraising and M&A plan materializes, the next few years will test whether an AI-oriented service firm from Bengaluru can do what Indian consulting firms never could: scale like a product company.
