Seasoned enterprise AI and data executive will lead Engineering, Product, and Design as Luminary accelerates its leadership in Physics AI
Luminary Cloud announced that Sudhir “Suds” Menon has joined the company as Chief Product Officer. Menon will oversee Engineering, Product, and Design and will report directly to CEO Pete Schlampp. His appointment marks another strategic milestone as Luminary continues to define and lead the emerging Physics AI category.
A Leader Joining at a Transformational Moment
Menon brings more than 25 years of experience delivering successful enterprise platforms in data, distributed systems, and AI. His career includes senior leadership and founding roles at Cloudera, Sema4.ai, SnappyData, VMware, Pivotal, and TIBCO, along with his recent work advising portfolio companies at Norwest Venture Partners. He has consistently built high performing engineering and product organizations while delivering technologies that reshape how enterprises use data and automation.
He joins Luminary at a time of rising demand for AI systems that can reason about and accelerate innovation in the physical world. Across aerospace, automotive, manufacturing, electronics, and defense, companies are seeking AI driven approaches that improve accuracy, reduce compute costs, and compress development cycles for complex physical products.
Momentum that Signals Category Leadership
Menon’s arrival follows a series of significant achievements that reflect Luminary’s rapid ascent.
In September 2025 the company announced a $72 million dollar Series B funding round led by N47 with participation from Sutter Hill Ventures and NVIDIA’s venture arm. The investment is accelerating the company’s roadmap, expanding its applied research, and strengthening its ability to scale deployments across multiple industries.
Luminary also recently unveiled a major collaboration with Northrop Grumman and NVIDIA that produced a new Physics AI model designed to speed the creation and testing of spacecraft components, including rocket thruster nozzle designs. The partnership was featured in national aerospace and defense publications and demonstrated the potential for Physics AI to shorten development cycles that traditionally require large scale simulation and physical testing.
These milestones reinforce that Luminary is not only early in this field but leading it. The company is proving that Physics AI can solve high stakes engineering problems with a level of accuracy and speed that traditional approaches cannot match.
A Vision for the Next Phase of AI
“While generative AI on LLMs has captured most of the attention in the past two years, the larger opportunity is applying AI to the physical world,” said Menon. “These are fundamentally massive compute and data challenges that require high accuracy from the start. Luminary, with its laser focus on Physics AI, is perfectly positioned to benefit from the investments being made across AI infrastructure. It is a privilege to lead the product and engineering teams and to build on the deep research expertise of the founding team.”
Strengthening the Executive Bench
“Suds is an exceptional leader who blends deep technical understanding with a proven ability to build world class enterprise products,” said Pete Schlampp, CEO of Luminary Cloud. “His experience scaling global teams and bringing advanced data and AI technologies to market is exactly what we need as Physics AI reaches an inflection point. With Suds leading engineering, product, and design, we are well positioned to deliver the next generation of tools that will define this category.”
Schlampp, who joined the company last year, has focused on strengthening Luminary’s leadership team, expanding research capabilities, and preparing the company for broad adoption of Physics AI across industry. Menon’s role is central to accelerating this strategy.
Menon most recently co-founded Sema4.ai, an AI agent platform focused on enterprise AI adoption. Prior to that he served as Chief Product Officer at Cloudera, where he oversaw all product delivery and support. He was cofounder and President of SnappyData, which was acquired by TIBCO in 2019. Earlier in his career he held senior engineering and product leadership roles at VMware, Pivotal, and TIBCO. He continues to serve as a senior advisor at Norwest Venture Partners, helping portfolio companies navigate the rapidly evolving AI landscape.
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