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Ajay Krishnan

AI-native lawyer and technology executive.

I build software, lead engineering teams, and turn legal experience into working products.

Shipping software since 2004. Called to the Ontario bar, 2012. Not practising.

Things I actually touched.

Work

Savvica, 2004

E-learning. J2EE, then Rails. Acquired by Educomp.

I co-founded an e-learning company in 2004. We wrote it in J2EE, rewrote it in Rails, and sold it to Educomp.

Barclays Capital, 2006

Regulation W compliance. Credit pricing on the grid. Eleven engineers.

Embedded at Barclays Capital. I built a Regulation W compliance system and a structured-credit pricing engine, and moved the quants' Excel toolkits onto grid services. The team grew to eleven.

The Ontario bar, 2012

Articled at Davies. Called in 2012. Not practising.

I articled at Davies, was called to the Ontario bar in 2012, then ran my own employment and technology practice until 2016. I do not practise now.

Tim Hortons, 2017

3,500 restaurants. One espresso machine each.

Tim Hortons put espresso in every Canadian restaurant. I owned the program — vendor negotiation, product approval, installation — until 3,500 of them had a machine.

Milk, five years

Roughly 45 million litres a year.

I led procurement and negotiated a five-year national dairy supply for the Canadian restaurants. Roughly 45 million litres of milk and cream a year.

Lobo Genetics, 2018

A swab kit through Health Canada, and the lab that read it.

I wrote the entire backend in Rails, took a buccal-swab test kit through Health Canada, and stood up the certified lab that processed it. Entheon bought us.

Caravel, fractional

AI governance, privacy, licensing.

Technology counsel, fractional, alongside the operating jobs. AI governance, privacy under PIPEDA and GDPR, and SaaS and IP licensing from seed stage to enterprise.

Fishtail, 2022

Cross-border trade collateral. Rails on GKE.

I architected and built the trade-collateral platform — Rails, PostgreSQL and Hotwire on GKE, with real-time document processing — and ran the first pilots with smaller exporters.

City Lifestyle, 2024

180 magazines to 350. Twenty-one engineers.

CTO and general counsel. Twenty-one engineers through three leads. I wrote the sales qualifier in Symfony myself. The network went from 180 magazines to 350 while I was there.

AI Growth Labs, now

Founding engineer.

After the executive seats I went back to writing code full time. Being directly hands-on is where the work is, and it is how I learn.

Built alone

Blackline

Canadian employment and contract research, free.

Coding agents read a treatise corpus in a sandbox of your own and answer with the passage attached. Waitlist-gated early trial, free.

Open Blackline

Greenroom

Argue aloud against an AI jurist.

Upload the brief and the record, then argue out loud. The jurist interrupts with questions tied to a passage, and keeps the transcript. Invite-only beta.

Open Greenroom

Slate

First-round voice interviews, scored against your rubric.

A recorded voice interview against the employer's own weighted rubric. A score may only cite that candidate's own answers. Live alpha, free.

Open Slate

Lintel

Ontario real estate, from the APS to the reporting letter.

AI real estate clerk and receptionist for Ontario lawyers. Send the APS; it carries the file to the reporting letter. The lawyer reviews, signs, registers and controls funds.

Open Lintel

Mine

Not a job

The rest of it.

Not everything is a job.

Ajay on a fire truck, printed as a two-colour risograph.

Ajay Krishnan

AI-native lawyer and technology executive.

Called to the Ontario bar, 2012. Not practising.

A few detours.

An ink-wash portrait of Ajay Krishnan. Still making things.

Read the film

A 32-second film about Ajay: software, law, kitchens, a lab, and what he makes now. Graphic scenes are illustrations, not archival footage. The costume and fire-truck photographs are real.

  1. I started with code. Savvica, 2004.
  2. Then law. Called to the Ontario bar in 2012. Not practising.
  3. 3,500 kitchens. Tim Hortons, 2017.
  4. A lab, too. Lobo Genetics, 2018.
  5. Law. Code. Both. Blackline, Greenroom, Slate and Lintel. Earlier work at Caravel, Fishtail and City Lifestyle.
  6. Not always serious. The costume and fire-truck photographs.
  7. Ajay Krishnan. Still making things.
Open the film