Prathik Naidu

Prathik Naidu is a founding partner at Long Lake, where he builds and deploys AI across the services economy. His work spans machine-learning research, customer-facing engineering, and products that automate business workflows.

Long Lake acquires and partners with services businesses, using its Nexus AI transformation platform to improve their operations. In 2026, it completed its acquisition of American Express Global Business Travel, with plans to apply AI to customer tools and support travel counselors.

From machine learning to business products

Naidu earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science at Stanford and built real-time graphics systems at NVIDIA. He was the first engineer at Skiff, later acquired by Notion. At Scale AI, he was a forward-deployed engineer leading customer-facing product and engineering development for Scale Document, which applied machine learning to document processing.

As a product lead at Rutter, Naidu worked on software connecting financial products to business data. He introduced Rutter Instant Link, which let a lender send a URL through which a business could connect its accounting, commerce, or payments accounts without the lender integrating code. The goal was to reduce friction in a loan application while giving the lender data for underwriting.

He also introduced Rutter Write Accounting, which used a unified API to send standardized data back to accounting systems. A payments company, for example, could record a payment and reconcile it with a bill without asking a finance team to re-enter the information.

Naidu co-authored the 2019 paper introducing DataWig, a tool for filling in missing values in tables. It combined deep-learning feature extractors with automated hyperparameter tuning to handle mixed data types, including unstructured text, with less manual feature engineering.