Independent Director

Reference: GILA/PB/C03/2608

Company stage: Series C

Seat classification: Contractually independent, non-executive private-company board seat; final statutory classification to be confirmed before appointment

Primary board geography: Bengaluru and Hyderabad with global customer operations

Meeting pattern: Seven boards, quarterly AI/Technology Risk Committee and two model assurance reviews

Status: Confidential retained-search specification; client identity only after conflict pre-clearance and NDA.

Anonymised company context

An enterprise AI company providing speech recognition, translation, summarisation and agent-assist products for contact centres, banks, telecom companies and public-service organisations across Indian languages.

The company has raised USD 80–120 million and reports recurring platform revenue plus implementation and usage fees. It uses proprietary and third-party foundation models, customer recordings and a distributed annotation workforce.

Calibrated market hint: Indian-language depth, twin engineering hubs and contact-centre focus point to a small enterprise-AI cohort while leaving identity protected. Candidates must treat any inference as confidential and disclose it only for conflict screening.
Why the seat exists now

The board needs independence on what the product can safely claim and which customers or use cases require human control. Accuracy averages can hide failure by language, accent, demographic group and consequence. Workforce and data provenance are as material as model quality.

At Series C, the company should be building option value: a later IPO, strategic transaction or continued private growth must all remain credible. That requires committee-grade oversight, disclosure-controlled KPIs, a clean group structure, mature risk ownership and decisions that serve the company rather than the timetable of any one shareholder.

Board design, authority and boundaries

Contractually independent director; Chair of voluntary AI, Data & Technology Risk Committee and member of Audit for KPI, revenue and capitalised-development matters.

The appointee is expected to ask for evidence, frame choices, record dissent and hold management accountable. The appointee is not a part-time executive, broker, operating consultant, fundraiser or representative of the investor who proposed the name. Management remains responsible for execution.

Strategic charter — first 18 months

1. Approve a risk-tier framework by use case, customer, decision consequence and degree of automation
2. Define release, rollback, human-review and prohibited-use requirements
3. Validate accuracy, hallucination, latency and harmful-output performance by language and cohort, not blended average
4. Map training-data, customer-recording, licence, consent and deletion rights
5. Govern annotator employment/vendor conditions, confidentiality, quality and exposure to harmful content
6. Review third-party model concentration, change notifications, security and exit options
7. Reconcile ARR, usage, bookings, implementation and GPU/cloud cost to controlled financial metrics
8. Prepare the company for product-liability, AI-regulation, customer diligence and eventual public-market disclosure without turning the director into a model reviewer

Decisions likely to reach this director

• Whether an accuracy level is sufficient for a bank or public-service use case
• Whether a third-party model change requires customer suspension
• Whether a fast-growing implementation should be counted as recurring product revenue

These are not hypothetical interview prompts. They describe the type of decision on which the board expects an independent company-interest view, including the ability to say not yet, only with conditions, or stop.

Candidate Description

Essential

• AI product-risk, enterprise software, language technology, contact-centre operations, privacy or cyber leader with board judgement
• Ability to translate model performance into customer harm and commercial decisions
• Recurring/usage economics
• Independence from model vendors and investors

Particularly valuable

• Multilingual evaluation, responsible AI, data rights, human-factors or critical enterprise deployment
• Major AI incident or model rollback
• Software IPO or global customer assurance

The search is deliberately open to former operators, founders, functional leaders, investors with genuine board experience, regulators, academics with operating relevance and experienced directors. Prior service on a listed board is useful but not a proxy for judgement.