Gramener
Gramener is a design-led data science and data visualisation company founded in Hyderabad in 2010 that helps organisations solve complex problems by turning data into clear, compelling stories. It built its name in India first through media work — most visibly election data visualisation for television news — and grew into an enterprise data and artificial intelligence firm serving pharmaceutical, manufacturing, technology, logistics, public sector and other clients internationally. Its low-code platform, Gramex, is the technology foundation for much of that work. Since November 2023 Gramener has been part of Straive, following its acquisition by that company. In a directory of Indian media agencies and services, Gramener earns its place through its formative contribution to Indian data journalism: it was among the first Indian firms to show, at national scale and in real time, what well-designed visualisation could do for a news audience.
Overview: data stories as a product
Gramener describes itself as a company that builds custom data and AI solutions to solve complex business problems with actionable insights and compelling data stories. The twin focus, stated by co-founder Ganes Kesari in interviews, is analytics and visualisation: finding the insight in data and then communicating it so that decision-makers actually use it. YourStory summarised the founding premise with a familiar line — a picture is worth a thousand words — and noted that Gramener, founded in 2010 with its headquarters in Hyderabad, was one of the first companies built around big data and visualisation service offerings. Rather than selling a generic dashboard tool, the company works consultatively: helping clients identify the right problems, locate where data can help, execute the analysis and carry the result through to adoption, with attention to business return on investment. That services-led model, accelerated by the Gramex platform, is what distinguishes it from both pure consulting firms and pure software vendors.
Founding in Hyderabad in 2010
Gramener originated in Hyderabad in 2010. Co-founder Naveen Gattu, speaking at the opening of the company's new India head office in Hyderabad's Nanakramguda Financial District, described it as having started in the city that year as the first data science and storytelling company, before expanding to global horizons and serving enterprises, the public sector and non-profits. Straive's acquisition announcement added that the company was co-founded in 2010 by a team of former IBM and BCG leaders to address the difficulty of consuming complex data for decision-making. One co-founder, Ganes Kesari, has also dated his own founding role to 2011 in an interview about his career, a small discrepancy typical of early-stage companies formalising over time; the company's consistent public founding year, used across its profiles and the acquisition coverage, is 2010. What is not in dispute is the Hyderabad origin, which the company has repeatedly emphasised even after its headquarters functions expanded to the United States.
Founders and leadership
Company profiles name a consistent founding and leadership group. Anand S is listed as co-founder and chief executive, and was quoted in that role in the Straive acquisition announcements. J. Ramachandran appears as co-founder and director. Ganes Kesari is co-founder and chief decision scientist, leading analytics and innovation, including the company's AI Labs and Data Story Labs; he has described a background of strategic technology work for clients such as General Electric and AT&T earlier in his career, and he became a public face of the company through writing and speaking on data storytelling, including a TEDx talk on the subject. Naveen Gattu is co-founder and chief operating officer, Mayank Kapur has been listed as chief delivery officer and co-founder, and Matt Ferry served as chief revenue officer during the Hyderabad expansion. S. Anand — the same Anand S — was profiled in Gramener's early years as its chief data scientist and the mind behind its best-known visualisations, work that included playful as well as serious demonstrations, such as visualising which sections of the Mahabharata mention Krishna and which characters interact with him most.
Gramex and the technology platform
Underpinning the services business is Gramex, described by the company as an open-standard, low-code platform that rapidly builds engaging data and AI solutions across business verticals and acts as an accelerator for using cloud-native services. Profiles of the company explain that its AI-led platform draws on computer vision, natural language processing, natural language generation and spatial analytics — capabilities that let it move from structured dashboards to automated narrative, image-based analysis and geographic insight. Kesari has explained that the platform exists because the market's gap was never the absence of tools: organisations already had platforms, but struggled to apply data science to specific business problems and, above all, to get people to consume the results. Gramex was built to shorten the path from data to a finished, designed, decision-ready application, so that Gramener's teams could deliver bespoke data stories at a pace and repeatability that hand-built projects could not match.
Media work: elections and newsrooms
Gramener's media work is the reason it appears in a news directory, and election coverage is its centrepiece. For the 2014 general elections it built an Election Analytics Centre in partnership with CNN-IBN and Microsoft, offering comprehensive analysis and visualisation of Indian general elections from 1951 to 2014 together with real-time analytics of counting-day results — work the channel's managing editor praised in the company's own case material as among the finest such partnerships, with reporters hearing positive responses from a usually critical public. It later worked with Republic TV on election coverage for the Gujarat and Karnataka assembly elections and subsequent general elections, supplying real-time visual tools with names that became a small vocabulary of Indian election television: Compass, for tracking party performance and swing seats; Strike Rate, comparing seats led with seats contested; Chord, showing seats gained and lost between elections as transfers between parties; a Colour Map combining constituency dots with party colours and regional filters; the Voter Matrix, tracking leads and vote share over time; and Winners and Runners storyboards after results. The company reported that Republic's streaming coverage recorded 122 million watch minutes on general election counting day, with a sharp rise in weekly impressions. It also worked with the India Today Group on revamping digital properties and automating content creation to improve traffic and engagement, according to its media case material.
Enterprise, public sector and social work
Beyond media, Gramener's client work spans pharmaceuticals and life sciences, logistics and manufacturing, ESG and sustainability, technology and consulting, and — in earlier profiles — telecom, banking and financial services, retail, healthcare, airlines and education. Acquisition coverage described more than two hundred clients worldwide and a team of more than two hundred and fifty employees, operating through six locations across the United States, India, Switzerland, Canada and Singapore. Its public and social sector work has used open data extensively: an Open Data Impact Map profile noted its use of Socio-Economic and Caste Census data, geospatial data and education data, including analysis of National Achievement Survey results that found parental occupation and education to be strong predictors of student outcomes, an exploration of India's economic diversity, a visual history of elections from 1951 onward, and analysis of public spending on toilet construction to evaluate a sanitation campaign for a non-governmental organisation. It also won a Microsoft award for a salmon detection application built to help protect salmon species in Washington's Nisqually River — an unusual but telling example of its visualisation and AI work travelling far from Hyderabad.
Hyderabad base and global footprint
Hyderabad remains the company's Indian anchor. Its India head office is at One West in Nanakramguda's Financial District, in premises inaugurated with Telangana's IT minister as chief guest, alongside the state's IT secretary and the chairman of the developer group. At that opening the company said the office would hold more than two hundred and fifty data science resources combining statistics, design and technology, and its chief revenue officer spoke of bringing more than five hundred additional data science jobs to Hyderabad over the following two years to serve North American demand, particularly in pharmaceuticals and life sciences, supply chain and logistics, and ESG. At the same time, company profiles list Princeton, New Jersey as a headquarters location, and the firm describes itself in acquisition-era material as New Jersey-based — a dual identity common among Indian-founded technology firms whose delivery heartland is India and whose largest market is the United States. Bengaluru and Singapore also feature in its location lists across profiles.
Acquisition by Straive in 2023
On 1 November 2023, Straive — a company that helps organisations operationalise the chain from data to insights, knowledge and AI, and which is owned by BPEA EQT, part of the global investment organisation EQT — announced its acquisition of Gramener, with Avendus Capital acting as exclusive financial advisor to Gramener and its shareholders; the price was not disclosed. Straive's chief executive said clients could immediately accelerate their data and AI transformation by using Gramener's experienced team, AI and analytics capabilities and multi-industry experience. Anand S said the combination would enable differentiated end-to-end offerings from data to AI and ultimately generative AI, and Naveen Gattu said partnering with Straive allowed Gramener to offer comprehensive services from data extraction and engineering through data science, visualisation and AI. Since the acquisition the company has traded as Gramener — a Straive company, keeping its brand, platform and Hyderabad base while sitting inside a larger global group.
Recognition and notable facts
Gramener's solutions and technology have been recognised by analyst firms including Gartner and Forrester, according to its profiles, which also list a Gartner market guide mention for AI services, inclusion in Deloitte's Fast 50 technology list in 2015 and 2016, NASSCOM Emerge 50 awards in 2012 and 2016, a NASSCOM top innovators listing in business analytics, a ranking among New Jersey's fastest-growing companies in 2020, and listings as a top data science and generative AI service provider in 2023, alongside SOC 2 Type II certification. The more durable distinction, for readers of this directory, is historical: in the early 2010s, when Indian news organisations were still deciding what data journalism was, Gramener was already building election visualisations that treated decades of results as a single explorable story and real-time counting data as a designed audience experience. That work helped set audience expectations that Indian news channels and digital publishers still design against on every counting day.
How to access and use Gramener
Gramener is a business-to-business firm: organisations engage it through its website, gramener.com, typically for defined data science, visualisation or AI projects, or to build applications on the Gramex platform. Its published case studies — including the Republic TV election work and its enterprise and sustainability projects — are the practical starting point for understanding what an engagement looks like, and its blog remains a substantial public resource on data visualisation technique, from election graphics explainers to analyses of how Indian media covered the 2019 Lok Sabha results across newspapers and television. Individual readers cannot subscribe to Gramener as a consumer product, and it publishes no news of its own; its influence on the news ecosystem runs through the newsrooms and platforms it has built for others. For media organisations, the relevant question it answers is how to make data legible at broadcast speed — a question it has been answering, from Hyderabad, since 2010.
