Sundar Vaidyanathan’s career has been shaped less by titles and more by the kinds of problems he wanted to work on. From engineering roles in India to large-scale transformation work in the U.S., each step pulled him deeper into the challenge of modernizing complex systems that sit at the heart of government operations.
As CEO and co-founder of Karsun Solutions, Vaidyanathan now leads a company that has delivered over $1 billion in federal IT modernization programs, with a growing focus on artificial intelligence, acquisition reform and mission-critical delivery.
In this Q&A, he reflects on the experiences that shaped his path, why entrepreneurship gave him the freedom to build differently and how Karsun is helping agencies take on legacy complexity and the next phase of modernization.
Can you provide a brief overview of your professional background and career progression?
My journey began in India as an electrical communication engineer, first designing systems at Indian Telephone Industries before moving into software development with Tata Consultancy Services. When I relocated to the U.S. to join KPMG Consulting, I was immersed in large-scale transformation programs for public-sector and high-tech clients, which gave me my first broad exposure to complex modernization efforts.
The real turning point came when I joined Unisys in Virginia. Beyond reducing the extensive travel of consulting, this role provided a masterclass in the sheer vastness of the U.S. Federal Government. I gained invaluable insights into how individual agencies are organized around distinct, critical missions yet must collaborate seamlessly to support the overall mission of the United States. I saw firsthand that the underlying systems and business processes are incredibly complex, designed specifically to enable operations on such a massive national scale.
In 2009, I co-founded Karsun with my business partner, Kartik Mecheri, to support acquisition modernization for GSA, and assumed the role of CEO at the company’s founding. Since then, we have grown Karsun into a trusted federal modernization partner, delivering over $1 billion+ in IT modernization programs.
Why was this the path you chose, and how influential was it to your career?
Across every stage of my career, what has consistently motivated me is solving complex problems for mission-driven customers. Whether I was working in telecom, consulting, or federal IT delivery, I found deep satisfaction in seeing technology make real-world processes faster, safer, and more effective.
However, large organizations often struggle with bureaucracy and internal politics, which can slow innovation and dilute accountability. Over time, I realized that the level of autonomy I wanted—to choose hard problems, bring novel solutions to customers, and directly shape outcomes for customers and teams—was only possible through an entrepreneurial path, despite its inherent risks.
Founding Karsun allowed me to build an organization rooted in long-term value rather than short-term financial targets. We view financial results as a natural byproduct of doing meaningful work and delivering successful outcomes at scale. This philosophy continues to guide how I lead: when you focus on your customers, your people, and making a meaningful impact, the growth naturally follows.
Do you have a personal connection to the current mission you support?
Yes, very much so. Because the GSA was our first prime customer, we saw firsthand how complex federal systems are and how critical they are to both agencies and the public. It is deeply fulfilling to see how our work in modernizing acquisition systems and a fleet-management platform directly improve the daily experience of thousands of federal employees and vendors. We take immense pride in knowing that our work has a direct impact on citizens’ lives.
For instance, our modernized grants platform helped FEMA manage the delivery of more than $4B in grants to citizens impacted by natural disasters. Today, we sustain and modernize over 200+ applications for the FAA, supporting their mission to provide the world’s safest, most efficient aerospace system. Knowing that our teams’ work improves safety, disaster response, and efficiency for millions of people is deeply motivating for me and for our company.
What are your current top priorities and responsibilities? How do these relate to your company’s overall mission/growth strategy?
My top three priorities are innovation, delivery excellence, and sustainable growth. I’ve learned that pursuing any one of these at the expense of others is a short-term play; instead, I focus on disciplined growth that protects our people from burnout while ensuring we never miss a beat on mission-critical outcomes.
The “heartbeat” of our strategy is an AI-first approach. We aren’t just talking about AI; we are embedding it into the fabric of our delivery to increase speed, improve quality, and lower total costs for the agencies. To institutionalize this, we invest heavily in the Karsun Innovation Center to build the tools and accelerators that enable our teams to excel.
A primary example is ReDux, our AI-powered agentic platform. We developed it to tackle massive modernization challenges at the GSA and FAA. ReDux uses advanced agents that “learn” as they go, blueprinting legacy systems and generating modern code. This has been a game-changer, allowing us to accelerate large-scale modernizations with fewer resources and higher quality, which significantly reduces rework and cost.
However, technology is only half the story. My responsibility as CEO is to ensure our people strategy is just as robust. While we keep compensation at or above industry standards, it is how we show up in a crisis that defines us. For instance, during recent government shutdowns, we provided training to over 160 employees and ensured not a single paycheck was missed. Ultimately, I strive to build an organization where people feel empowered to take on the toughest missions for our customers.
Where do you and your team see growth opportunities in your current field or portfolio you support, or what do you anticipate being your customers’ top pain points?
Growth opportunities and customer pain points for our current portfolio cluster around a few recurring themes: legacy complexity, data fragmentation, and the pressure to do more with less.
There is significant opportunity in accelerating end‑to‑end modernization of legacy applications, especially where mainframe or heavily customized COTS systems constrain agility and degrade user experience. Agencies wrestle with these complex, aging legacy systems that are costly to maintain, difficult to secure, and slow to change, even as expectations for digital self‑service and real‑time visibility into business operations increase.
These systems were built on architectures that struggle to keep pace with evolving regulatory and deregulatory requirements. Persistent data silos across programs and systems remain a major barrier, making it hard to achieve a single, trusted view of records and to comply efficiently with changing reporting, audit, and cybersecurity requirements. Our customers are under constant pressure to modernize quickly without disrupting mission operations, all while managing limited budgets, workforce constraints, and the imperative to adopt AI responsibly and securely.
How are you and your team planning to address/prepare for these opportunities?
A major focus for my team is adopting an AI first mindset across our current portfolios so that every new capability, enhancement, and operation deliberately leverages AI to improve mission outcomes. We are moving from treating AI as a niche add on to making it a default part of how we design, build, and operate systems—using ReDux, our AI powered platform, to rapidly blueprint legacy environments, generate target architecture code, and automate workflows and compliance activities.
The platform helps customers discover transparent, actionable insights even from low code and other “black box” systems, build a 360-degree view of legacy structures, and translate embedded business rules into clear functional requirements. This enables us to work significantly faster and with less rework, while retaining institutional knowledge and reducing risk in large scale modernization.
ReDux not only understands the legacy applications but also helps reimagine the new design, architecture, and code, regardless of complexity and migration risks. Using a comprehensive digital workforce of AI agents, we can convert legacy code into modern functional equivalents and accelerate development into modern, modular, cloud native environments.
These autonomous agents take on repeatable analysis, translation, and validation tasks so our teams can focus on higher value design, architecture, and mission alignment. By building and reusing these AI enabled capabilities across our portfolios, we directly address pain points such as legacy complexity, data fragmentation, and manual, error prone processes, while lowering overall modernization cost and improving delivery speed and quality.
A core part of our plan is aggressive workforce upskilling so that every role in our company is comfortable using AI in the flow of work—for code generation, test automation, documentation, analytics, and day to day decision support. This mirrors the federal emphasis on building an AI ready workforce and closing critical AI skills gaps. We are implementing structured learning paths, hands on labs, and “AI champions” within teams so AI is not confined to a small center of excellence but embedded in every scrum team and workstream across the portfolios we support.
The current administration’s strong push for AI, innovation, and faster, more secure modernization gives our customers both policy cover and clear incentives to move quickly. We are capitalizing on this by bringing ready to demonstrate AI capabilities—such as ReDux—into roadmaps and demos, showing not just cost savings but meaningful reductions in time to capability.
In each portfolio, we are framing AI first initiatives around measurable mission gains: faster delivery of new features, higher quality and security, reduced total cost of ownership, and better user and citizen outcomes, backed by pilots, metrics, and success stories that give our customers confidence to scale.
How important is mentorship & networking in GovCon? Were they influential to your career?
Mentorship and networking have been foundational pillars for expanding my horizons, increasing my awareness of the GovCon landscape, and driving both my professional and personal growth. From my early days at KPMG Consulting, cultivating a strong network allowed me to see and pursue opportunities well beyond what was visible from my immediate role and limited connections. I have never hesitated to reach beyond my direct reporting chain to ensure people understood who I am and what I bring to the table.
That proactive networking opened doors to challenging internal assignments in R&D, customer delivery, and sales pursuits, and it reinforced how mentors and sponsors can accelerate career progression by making key introductions and advocating for you.
Externally, I made it a priority to stay actively engaged in industry organizations such as ACT IAC, not just as a participant but as a volunteer leader. Over the past 15 years, I have chaired special interest groups, led leadership programs, and served on the ACT IAC Industry Advisory Council Board, which significantly deepened my relationships with both government and industry leaders and kept me close to emerging trends in federal technology.
Most of my major career and business opportunities have come through this network, long before there was a specific role or contract in mind. A vital lesson I’ve learned is the importance of cultivating a network before you need it; if you only begin networking when pursuing a specific opportunity, you’re already behind.
What is something most people don’t know about you personally?
Outside of work, I’ve developed a real passion for golf over the past couple of years. I now play regularly and often participate in charity tournaments—and I’ve finally started breaking 100. It has become a great way to manage stress, stay disciplined, and build relationships outside the office, even if my scorecard still leaves plenty of room for improvement.