Where does Kunal Punera work?

Kunal Punera is Founder of Bluebirds.

What companies did Kunal Punera found?

Kunal Punera founded Bluebirds.

Where did Kunal Punera go to school?

Kunal Punera studied at The University of Texas at Austin (PhD, Machine learning, web mining).

Kunal Punera

Founder

Founder at Bluebirds

Mountain View, California, United States

FoundedBluebirds · YC

About

Kunal held leadership roles in AI at LinkedIn overseeing teams across Recruiter, Premium, and Learning products, and previously worked as a founding engineer at RelateIQ (acquired by Salesforce). He co-founded Bento Labs in 2014 and holds a PhD in machine learning from the University of Texas at Austin, with prior research experience at Yahoo! on NLP.

Founder at Bluebirds YC W23

Intro paths

Kunal went through Y Combinator (Winter 2023) — any YC alum in your network can reach them through the YC community.

Their group partner at YC was Jared Friedman, YC Group Partner — the partner who ran Bluebirds's batch and knows the company first-hand. YC profile ↗

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In turn, Kunal can intro founders to Bluebirds's investors below.

Bluebirds's investors · 4

1984 Ventures Management, LlcSan Francisco · $1M checks Lightspeed Venture PartnersMenlo Park · $1.7M – $87M checks Soma CapitalSacramento · $100K – $300K checks Y CombinatorSan Francisco · $500K checks · since 2023

Co-founders at Bluebirds

Rohan PunamiaFounder

Experience

SalesforceVice President of Engineering, Agentforce Salescurrent2025 — present
Bluebirds (YC W'23) (Acquired by Salesforce in Aug 2025)Co-founder & CTO2023 — 2025San Francisco, California, United States
LinkedInDirector Of Engineering2020 — 2023Sunnyvale
GoogleEngineering Manager / Staff Software Engineer2016 — 2020Mountain View
Bento LabsCo-Founder and CTO2014 — 2016San Francisco Bay Area
A Big Data start-upAdvisor2013 — 2015
RelateIQData Products Engineering2012 — 2014
Yahoo!Senior Research Scientist2007 — 2012

Skills & more

Data Mining29Machine Learning38Information Retrieval15Text Mining12Natural Language Processing13Recommender Systems2Web Mining4Information Extraction3Text Classification1Text Analytics1Algorithms11Collaborative Filtering1

+12 more

Computational LinguisticsApache PigArtificial IntelligenceSentiment AnalysisBig DataScalabilityDistributed SystemsSemantic WebHadoopMapReduceSearchComputer Science

From Kunal's professional profile.

Frequently asked questions

Who is Kunal Punera?: Kunal held leadership roles in AI at LinkedIn overseeing teams across Recruiter, Premium, and Learning products, and previously worked as a founding engineer at RelateIQ (acquired by Salesforce). He co-founded Bento Labs in 2014 and holds a PhD in machine learning from the University of Texas at Austin, with prior research experience at Yahoo! on NLP.
Where does Kunal Punera work?: Kunal Punera is Founder of Bluebirds.
What companies did Kunal Punera found?: Kunal Punera founded Bluebirds.
Where did Kunal Punera go to school?: Kunal Punera studied at The University of Texas at Austin (PhD, Machine learning, web mining).