Shekhar Natarajan, Founder & CEO – Orchestro.AI
Photos by Antoine Verglas
Shekhar Natarajan’s story doesn’t read like a conventional tech-founder arc. It isn’t a sleek sequence of seed rounds and product pivots; it’s a long, human journey shaped by family obligations, unlikely angels, the humility of logistics, and a radical belief that technology serves best when it is explicitly designed to honor people.
In a conversation that traced his path from a one-room home in Hyderabad to the helm of Orchestro.AI, Natarajan returned again and again to one conviction: businesses don’t run on algorithms—they run on people. And if artificial intelligence is going to make any lasting difference, it must be built to protect and elevate the human experience at scale.
This is the worldview that earned him the Signature Awards’ Global Impact prize on Friday night. By Monday, with a flight to catch and a packed calendar, he sat down to unpack how hardship forged his compass, why collaboration—not conquest—is the future of global logistics, and what he means by “angelic intelligence,” a values-forward model for decision-making that Orchestro.AI is engineering into the physical movement of goods.
The Room With Eight People
The first chapter of Natarajan’s story begins in a single room he shared with seven others in Hyderabad. His father earned the equivalent of $1.75 a month. One brother struggled with bipolar disorder in a culture where mental health support often ceded to superstition.
Those circumstances left scars—fear, anxiety, the pressure to perform—but they also supplied the determination and empathy that shape his leadership now. He doesn’t romanticize deprivation, yet he refuses to erase it from the story. “Looking back, I don’t want it any different,” he says—not because poverty is noble, but because it taught him to locate dignity in the human will to keep moving.
That will was tested early. When his elder brother in the United States broke his arm and left school to send money home for Shekhar’s education, the gesture confronted him with a choice. He would not let his brother sacrifice alone. With $34 in his pocket, a sack of groceries, flip-flops, and a few changes of clothes, he left India. He chose Georgia Tech for a deeply practical reason: it was a four-hour drive from Tuscaloosa, which meant he could see his brother every weekend. Proximity, not prestige, guided the decision. Family first, then the rest.
It was the beginning of a pattern: the human stakes would keep redirecting his professional path.
A Movie Résumé and Coca-Cola
Natarajan admits there’s a streak of stubborn clarity in him. While classmates from Georgia Tech’s vaunted Industrial Engineering program fanned into finance and consulting, he insisted on staying in supply chain—a field he describes as “process engineering grown up.” It was a risky bet. With two weeks left on his visa and sleeping on his brother’s couch, he mailed a movie-format résumé—small enough to fit on a business card—to Ron Hammond, then a senior executive at Coca-Cola (and now his company’s CEO). The unusual résumé didn’t just get noticed; it got him hired.
Coke, at the time, was transforming how it distributed a product portfolio that had ballooned far beyond a few classic SKUs. Natarajan became what he calls “a prodigy of transformation”—not because he was chasing novelty, but because he found transformation is always, at its core, about people. “Technology doesn’t drive these companies,” he says. “People drive the company.” The lesson stuck as he went on to work with Pepsi, Disney, Walmart, and American Eagle: brands are built on a social contract, on pride, on thousands of invisible acts of responsibility. Systems are necessary; culture is decisive.
He has a way of translating logistics into something you can feel. Consider a can of pears: grown in Chile, cut in Thailand, packed in China, stocked in New York—20,000 miles of orchestration delivered for fifty cents.
You can only hold that system together at scale if millions of people, from dockhands to drivers to planners, refuse to let the customer down. When disruption hits—and in modern supply chains, everything is an exception—humans stitch the world back together.
The Heart Decides, the Brain Rationalizes
Ask Natarajan what makes a leader effective and he doesn’t launch into frameworks. He talks about psychology. “We mistakenly think the brain is the most important function,” he says. “People take decisions with the heart; the brain rationalizes what the heart has already decided.” You don’t pick gelato by calorie count; you pick what makes you feel good and justify it later. He isn’t anti-logic. He just recognizes that persuasion, change, and resilience start in the emotional center. If you want to transform a company, you have to contact its people’s pride, insecurity, hope, and meaning.
This isn’t sentimentality. It’s operational realism. Workers who feel respected solve problems that software can’t anticipate. Vendors treated like partners become collaborators when the pressure hits. Culture turns procedures into habits, and habits into performance. It’s also why he insists that any discussion of artificial intelligence must begin with the human experience it will amplify—or erode.
The Inflection Point
By 2017, Natarajan had racked up international awards, high-pay roles, and public recognition. Inside, he felt hollow. Two family tragedies bracket that year in his memory: first, the painful decision to let his father pass when he was in a vegetative state; then, the call that his mother needed him, too. He became her voice and hands through a difficult season. Between hospital corridors and long quiet hours, the question rose: Was success about proving himself on a balance sheet—or about serving the kinds of people he came from?
The answer clarified again in 2020 when his son was born with his father’s face and smile. Legacy suddenly meant more than personal achievement. He didn’t want to pass down money alone; he wanted to pass down a world designed with compassion. The dissonance broke. He left the corporate ladder to build something new.
Intrapreneurship at American Eagle: A Proof of Concept
Before stepping out, Natarajan ran an experiment inside American Eagle. He launched a business-within-a-business that aggregated logistics capacity across “frenemies”—brands that compete at the storefront but share the same costly, duplicative, and underutilized operational underbelly. The thesis was simple and countercultural: compete on what makes your brand unique; collaborate on the infrastructure that gets the goods to the customer.
In nine months, that internal venture grew from $60 million to $390 million in revenue. Fifteen brands joined: Fanatics, Steve Madden, Saks, Adore Me, and more. By pooling demand and resources, they reduced delivery cost per package and improved speed. American Eagle, whose digital business was growing roughly 30% year over year at the time, simultaneously reduced delivery expenses as a share of revenue—a paradox in an era when shipping costs were inflating across the industry. The secret? Scale through collaboration, not empire-building.
The experience rewired Natarajan’s view of control. In supply chain, he says, companies cling to an illusion of ownership: “I don’t own the factory. I don’t own the ship. I don’t own the port. I don’t own the carrier. What do I really own?” Brands own their promise to the customer; everything else is a shared utility that works better when it’s interoperable. That insight would become the philosophical backbone of Orchestro.AI.
Orchestro.AI: Toward a Physical Internet
Orchestro.AI’s founding idea is disarmingly clean: treat the movement of physical goods the way the internet routes data packets—open, dynamic, and optimized across many independent networks. Today’s logistics are siloed. Place six orders to the same address and you might see six different carriers ring your doorbell. That redundancy raises costs, emissions, and frustration. The networks are closed and opaque.
Orchestro.AI wants to render that opacity transparent. Any given parcel should be able to attach itself to the optimal resource for each leg of the journey in near-real time—regional carrier here, micro-fulfillment there, a different last-mile option two neighborhoods over—all stitched together by a marketplace and decision engine that doesn’t care who owns the asset so long as it’s the best fit. The result is a common carriage for commerce, where small carriers gain access to big-brand demand, small brands gain the cost structure of giants, and the customer gets reliable speed without a premium.
Is the ambition extravagant? Natarajan shrugs and points to the numbers he’s already seen. In previous work, pooled networks roughly halved delivery costs—say, from $9 to under $5 per package—while improving performance. At full scale, he believes the industry could approach sub-dollar delivery economics for certain patterns of demand and density. Whether or not you accept the exact figure, the direction is unmistakable: interoperability turns waste into capacity.
The crucial twist is that Orchestro.AI isn’t just an exchange. It’s a values filter for how decisions are made inside that exchange.
From Artificial to Angelic Intelligence
When Natarajan says “AI,” he doesn’t mean content generators or prediction engines alone. He distinguishes between artificial intelligence—systems that automate cognitive tasks—and what he calls angelic intelligence, or benevolent intelligence embedded with human virtues: compassion, humility, temperance, forgiveness. It’s a provocative phrase, but he’s precise about what it implies: train decision models to privilege human outcomes alongside efficiency, and make those priorities measurable.
Consider a concrete scenario from a warehouse floor: a luxury handbag and a critical medical parcel sit side by side. Traditional orchestration favors the higher-margin shipment, the one that paid for speed. Angelic intelligence asks a different first question: who needs this more, and what are the consequences of delay? It then finds a way to honor both commitments—rerouting, consolidating, or time-shifting where possible—so the medical delivery gets precedence without breaking the luxury promise. Compassion becomes a constraint in the optimization, not a postscript.
This isn’t charity; it’s brand strategy for the age of automation. As generative AI commoditizes content and code, authenticity becomes the only durable differentiator. Customers will buy from brands that act human—who show their values not just in ads but in the invisible decisions of operations. If every company can produce glossy language and images on demand, the test of a brand’s soul moves downstream, into fulfillment, service, and recovery. Orchestro.AI’s bet is that operational empathy can be calculated, tracked, and rewarded.
That logic extends to the people doing the work. A driver who consistently goes the extra mile—literally and figuratively—should see that virtue recognized in a score that travels with them, unlocking better pay, financing, and opportunities. Natarajan imagines a kind of “karma credit” running alongside carbon metrics: not as surveillance theater, but as a way to put a market value on pro-social behavior that already keeps the system afloat.
Decision-Making at Entrepreneurial Speed
Leaving corporate life stripped away the buffer. Natarajan, who once had chiefs of staff and multiple executive assistants, now wears every hat: janitor, accountant, coder, salesperson, product thinker, investor liaison. The experience humbled him in the best way. Vendors who once queued for minutes of his attention are now prospective customers whose time he must earn. Relationships matter even more when the title on your card doesn’t carry the same gravitational pull.
What surprised him most is how quickly entrepreneurs must make sound decisions with incomplete information. In a large enterprise, choices move through layers. In a startup, you are the layers. The antidote isn’t recklessness, he says, but a willingness to choose, monitor, and correct fast. Wrong turns aren’t fatal if your moral and strategic compass is steady: serve the customer, serve the team, serve the mission.
Collaboration Beats Control
The hardest mental shift for the industry, in Natarajan’s view, will be surrendering the illusion of control. Brands can—and should—compete ferociously on product, story, and experience. But beneath that surface, replication is waste. No one wants five water utilities piping to the same home; why do we accept a half-dozen overlapping, underutilized logistics networks converging on the same neighborhood every afternoon?
When networks compose instead of compete, small carriers can look like national ones overnight; small merchants can offer fast, affordable shipping without burning their margin; large incumbents can retire stranded cost and turn it into new growth. Everyone wins, so no one fights. It’s an old idea—shared infrastructure—and a new execution, made possible by software, data, and the cultural willingness to trust the commons again.
The Human Lens on a Technical Future
If the future belongs to those who master AI, Natarajan wants to be clear about which AI he means. He doesn’t dismiss automation’s power; he’s spent a career using it to transform complex systems. But he insists that any technology worthy of the name “intelligence” must be accountable to the hearts it touches. That stance doesn’t make him anti-profit. It makes him pro-purpose. He’s seen how equating money with value warps judgment. Value is the positive change you create in other people’s lives; money is one way the world acknowledges it.
There’s a reason his argument resonates with policymakers and executives from the Middle East to Southeast Asia to Europe. Societies are grappling with the same questions parents are: What will our children do in a world where machines do so much? How do we prepare them not just to make a living, but to live well? If the answer is more technology, then the follow-up must be: more humane technology, on purpose.
Orchestro.AI’s contribution is to encode that purpose where customers rarely look—into the routers of the physical world. When a package arrives on time, few wonder how many decisions it took to get there. Natarajan wants those decisions to carry a signature: efficiency, yes, but also empathy. In that sense, Orchestro.AI isn’t just building a logistics platform. It’s attempting to prove that virtues can scale.
What Success Looks Like
For Natarajan, success isn’t a valuation milestone or an exit. It starts with small evidence that the system is learning to care. A medical parcel prioritized over luxury without drama. A driver’s good judgment rippling forward into better financial options for their family. A small merchant in Birmingham shipping to a customer in Riyadh next-day at a price that used to be impossible. Fifteen brands turning “enemy” into “frenemy,” then into ecosystem. A cost curve bending down even as demand bends up.
The signature of these wins is quiet, almost invisible—like the best logistics. But over time, they compound into something you can’t miss: a world where the underbelly of commerce is less wasteful, less brittle, more fair. Where speed and compassion aren’t trade-offs. Where a boy from a one-room house can grow up to design a system that remembers where he came from, and intentionally leaves the ladder down.
The Work Ahead
There’s plenty left to build. Interoperability requires trust, governance, and incentives sturdy enough to withstand commercial weather. The models behind “angelic intelligence” must be transparent and auditable, with guardrails that prevent virtue-scoring from becoming punitive or performative. The culture inside Orchestro.AI must mirror the world it wants to midwife—diverse, respectful, fast, and humble.
But if Natarajan’s path so far is a predictor, the company’s north star won’t drift. He’ll keep asking the same first question in different forms: “What’s the human here?” That lens guided him from a neighbor’s phone in Hyderabad to a Georgia dorm room, from a movie résumé to a seat inside Coke’s transformation, from transformation roles across blue-chip brands to intrapreneurial success at American Eagle, and finally to Orchestro.AI.
Whether you call it benevolent intelligence or simply good judgment at scale, he’s betting that future-defining systems will be engineered not just to move stuff, but to move us—toward a standard of care we can measure, manage, and be proud of. Technology will do what it always does: accelerate the direction we choose. Shekhar Natarajan’s choice is clear. The destination is human.