We're excited to welcome Sumanth Sukumar as Altruist's new Chief Technology Officer. Sumanth shares what drew him to our company and his vision for the next chapter of engineering at Altruist.
Connecting with the mission
"I loved working at cutting-edge businesses like Coinbase, Uber, and Facebook during periods of momentous growth," Sumanth reflects. "We were building products with massive scale and significant societal influence.”
At Altruist, Sumanth carries this trend forward into one of the most critical areas of people’s lives: their finances.
"I connected with the mission immediately,” he says. “And I could feel how deeply it matters to Jason and the rest of the team."
Innovating in highly regulated industries
Sumanth's time at Coinbase gave him a valuable perspective on pushing technological boundaries while navigating complex regulatory environments.
"Yes, Coinbase is a crypto company. And crypto has its share of bad actors," he acknowledges candidly. "But Brian Armstrong's bet was to be the most trusted name in crypto—that Coinbase would aspire to play by the rules and help regulators establish an environment that created more protections for consumers which proved to be the winning formula over the longer term.”
His experience working with regulators translates well. “I spent a lot of time working on regulatory issues, infrastructure security, safeguarding customer data, and privacy, all of which are essential to maintaining trust with Altruist’s customers and their end clients."
AI as a competitive advantage
When asked about emerging technologies, Sumanth sees immediate and significant opportunities in artificial intelligence.
"AI can be a big differentiator for Altruist. We're nimbler than the legacy incumbents. We can move faster. AI has the potential to unlock productivity through internal tooling as well as innovative product features for our customers."
His network in AI keeps him at the forefront of developments. "I co-hosted a dinner recently around the topic of AI agents with a bunch of other CTOs and senior engineering leaders from companies that develop frontier models and their leading users ... and there was so much excitement. We can't imagine everything that AI will be capable of down the line, but it's obvious that there are many useful things it can do for us today."
Quality and velocity
As our new CTO, Sumanth has an ambitious objective.
"My mandate at Altruist is to build a high-performance team who can successfully balance incredible pace with uncompromising attention to detail. To drive growth while ensuring quality—that's probably the simplest way to say it. That was a big part of my responsibilities at Uber and Coinbase. Bringing that to Altruist means expanding an already impressive organization, empowering them with the best tooling, and setting up effective internal systems."
Sumanth’s blend of technical expertise, leadership, regulatory knowledge, and commitment to meaningful impact will be an invaluable asset to advancing our mission of making financial advice better, more affordable, and accessible to everyone.
We’re thrilled to welcome him to the team.
