Who is Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy? The former startup CEO entrusted with Cisco’s legacy code overhaul
A 27-year-old Indian-origin engineer has landed a major assignment at US technology giant Cisco, with President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel entrusting him with an ambitious project to refactor 98% of the company's legacy code within 24 months.
Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, popularly known as “Paddy”, is a computer science engineer, AI researcher and startup entrepreneur who co-founded EzDubs, a real-time speech translation startup later acquired by Cisco.
According to a Fortune report, Patel came across Krishnamurthy during a visit to Cisco's San Francisco office. Despite being a former startup co-founder and CEO, Krishnamurthy was working several levels below the company's senior leadership in what Patel described as an unstrategic role.
Their conversation changed that. Krishnamurthy proposed that he could rewrite Cisco's legacy code with a team of just two people. Patel was impressed by the approach and gave him four weeks to demonstrate what he could achieve.
Patel has also given the engineer access to unlimited AI tokens to work on the project, Fortune reported. The broader target is to refactor 98% of Cisco's legacy code over the next two years.
The assignment reflects Patel's push to bring younger employees into strategic roles and encourage them to challenge established practices within the company.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Krishnamurthy is currently working as Technical Assistant to the President at Cisco, a position he took up in October 2026.
He previously served as co-founder and co-CEO of EzDubs, which he established in January 2023. The startup developed real-time speech translation models designed to translate conversations in less than 800 milliseconds while preserving the speaker's voice and emotions.
EzDubs' acquisition by Cisco brought Krishnamurthy into the technology giant, where he is now taking on a much larger software engineering challenge.
Krishnamurthy's work on EzDubs builds on his academic research into speech technology and artificial intelligence.
Between September 2021 and December 2022, he worked as a graduate researcher at Columbia University in New York. His research focused on deep learning for cross-lingual speech synthesis and automated dubbing.
He also has an earlier association with Cisco. Between June and September 2022, he worked as a software engineering intern at the company's Speech AI Lab, where he contributed to text-to-speech technology for Webex and Vidcast.
His experience in speech AI and machine learning has been central to his entrepreneurial journey.
Before EzDubs, Krishnamurthy co-founded another venture called Helen AI in February 2019.
The project involved developing a wearable camera that could interpret silent lip movements using artificial intelligence. The idea was to create a device that could supplement hearing aids and enable communication in noisy environments without depending on audio.
Krishnamurthy and his co-founder developed spatiotemporal convolutional neural networks that could convert lip movements into text and even generate audible speech.
Helen received several awards and recognitions, including runner-up honours at the James Dyson Award, global recognition at the IET Present Around the World competition and the HKUST President's Cup.
The project was also presented at the Re-Work event in San Francisco in 2020.
Krishnamurthy holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from Columbia University, where he graduated with a reported GPA of 4.04.
His master's thesis focused on cross-lingual speech synthesis and automated dubbing under the guidance of Professor Lydia Chilton.
Before Columbia, he completed a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Computer Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).
His academic achievements include the HKUST Outstanding Students Award, the Professor Samuel Chanson Best Final Year Project Award in 2021 and the university's President's Cup in 2019. He was also a hackUST winner in 2018.
Krishnamurthy studied at Bengaluru's Bishop Cotton Boys' School, where he completed his Indian School Certificate examinations in 2017 with 98.5%, placing him in the top 1% nationally, according to his LinkedIn profile.
He was also the school's captain, leading a student body of around 6,000, and received the Best All Rounder award in 2015.
Krishnamurthy's appointment is also part of Patel's broader effort to encourage younger employees to challenge conventional approaches at Cisco.
In his conversation with Fortune, Patel said companies needed early-career professionals to bring fresh ideas and question established practices. He believes employees with less experience can sometimes ask questions that long-serving professionals may overlook because they are accustomed to existing systems.
Patel also acknowledged that bringing younger employees into teams with colleagues who have spent decades at the company can create friction. However, he believes differences in perspectives can lead to better ideas, provided disagreements remain focused on the work rather than personalities.
He also treats interns as reverse mentors and visits college campuses to identify young talent, Fortune reported.
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