Sonali Pattnaik

Sonali Pattnaik
Occupation	Co-founder and CTO of Lighthouz AI
Known for	Co-founding Lighthouz AI
Education	IIT Kharagpur (B.Tech)

Sonali Pattnaik is an Indian technology entrepreneur and engineer who is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Lighthouz AI, a back-office automation company serving the freight brokerage industry. Lighthouz AI was part of Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch.

Early life and education

Pattnaik holds a Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (IIT Kharagpur).

Career

Prior to founding Lighthouz AI, Pattnaik led artificial intelligence teams at Progressive and Halliburton, gaining experience in applied AI and machine learning within large enterprise environments.

Pattnaik co-founded Lighthouz AI alongside Srijan Kumar. The company, based in San Francisco, develops AI-powered software that automates back-office financial operations for freight brokers. Its platform focuses on three core areas: carrier bill auditing, accounts payable (AP) and accounts receivable (AR) automation, and collections management.

The Lighthouz AI platform ingests carrier bills in formats such as PDF and EDI and audits them against data from transportation management systems (TMS). When the audit passes, the system automates data entry, document uploads, and approvals for both carrier bills and customer invoices. According to the company, the platform achieves 70–80% no-touch automation, meaning the majority of emails and documents processed do not require human intervention. The company states that brokerages using Lighthouz AI invoice customers 36% faster—reducing invoicing time from an average of 5.2 days to 2.9 days—get paid five days sooner, and reduce back-office costs by approximately 40%.

The platform also includes functionality for verifying proofs of delivery (PoDs) and surfacing exceptions before they cause payment delays. Lighthouz AI handles both full truckload (FTL) and less-than-truckload (LTL) freight bill auditing and can automatically file disputes when discrepancies are identified.

The company is SOC 2 Type II compliant and operates in the artificial intelligence, SaaS, workflow automation, logistics, and supply chain sectors. Lighthouz AI has received backing from investors including Gaingels and Endiya Partners. The company's leadership team collectively brings over 25 years of experience in supply chain, logistics, and artificial intelligence.