Prerna Goja, Founder and CEO of Zensa, Talks About Digital Transformation and Tech Inclusion

Prerna Goja is the Founder and CEO of Zensa LLC, a technology transformation company that helps companies digitally transform through cloud computing, data analytics, IoT, AI/ML, and other advanced technologies. Not incidentally, she is a mother of twins as well as a tech founder and CEO.

Zensa, located in Redmond, Washington, is a Microsoft ISV Gold Partner. It was named on the Inc. 1000 list of America’s Fastest Growing Private Companies in 2019. Prerna Goga was recognized with the “Fast 50 Asian American Business Excellence Award” in 2022.

Prerna, as she is known to all, has 14+ years of experience scaling and growing tech companies. She brings a fresh collaborative, holistic, and fresh point of view to companies. We asked her about her career in tech, the ethos of Zensa, and how she juggles her duties at home and at work.

Grit Daily: What services does Zensa provide its clients?

Prerna Goja: Zensa is a technology company headquartered in Redmond with a global presence in countries like Italy, Mexico, Canada, and India. We combine innovation and technology with deep human-centric values to help our customers or other organizations build the best solutions. I think of Zensa as a digital imperative company. We are building technology solutions through every process or every challenge or every outcome that our clients are looking for. We enable businesses to accelerate their digital transformations, effectively address competitive challenges, and rapidly expand globally, all in a secure and controlled manner. At Zensa, we offer comprehensive cloud enablement, management, AI, and governance solutions to help companies maximize their IT investments and drive innovation.

Grit Daily: Zensa recently introduced Prospur, which is intended for smaller businesses. Please tell me about that.

Prerna Goja: Inclusion is one of the core values for Zensa and we have incorporated that thought leadership across our company, our services, and our products. At the early stages of COVID, we became aware of the challenges that small and medium-sized businesses were experiencing. As a result, we began working on developing a technology that could address the problems that our country and the rest of the world were beginning to experience, whether they were due to Covid or economic impacts after Covid.

We wanted to help small and medium businesses in their rebuilding and recovery, so we developed an AI-driven platform for small and medium-sized businesses to transform them digitally by helping them connect, engage, and acquire the customer. In our opinion, small businesses can achieve better business and customer-centric outcomes by being Cloud-enabled and data-driven, thus we designed a single AI platform for all of their business needs.

The early adoption process has been excellent. The customer reviews and responses have been overwhelming. We are collaborating with a few governmental organizations, and we may offer free Prospur licenses to small and medium-sized businesses that are attempting to transform, revive and reimagine their businesses and we are constantly on a path of developing new features every few quarters to help our customers provide the best experience.

Grit Daily: Zensa is a Microsoft partner company and you’re located in Redmond. Which came first?

Prerna Goja: That’s an interesting question. Aside from the Pacific Northwest being a beautiful region, I believe Redmond—a city full of high-tech businesses that always buzzes with innovation and has a diverse and eclectic culture—always felt like home to me. Being close to Microsoft was an additional advantage for us, and the start-up culture here is fantastic. The majority of our Executive team has great experience in the Technology ecosystem formerly working or engaging with top global technology companies in the area, so I’d say it was a really natural fit.

Grit Daily: You founded Zensa after having your own corporate career. Tell me about that a little bit.

Prerna Goja: I have had experience in scaling and growing technology companies through innovation, transformation, and strategic partnerships for most of my career. Being a Technology Executive, I have always been very passionate about digital transformation and building innovation. I have had experience working with various companies globally to help build the best technology solutions and drive scale and revenue.

I have led global teams that managed operations, sales, services, and support for hi-tech and healthcare companies, in most of my roles I was responsible for defining strategy, aligning client acceleration, and supporting the lifecycle for transformational solutions.

I think I always wanted to be an Entrepreneur and a few years ago while going through a personal transformational journey, I got an opportunity to make that change and build a business and a team that believed in a similar vision. We wanted to build technology that could help automate and provide the best customer experiences while creating solutions.

Zensa has been a great success in providing the same value to its customers through its strategic and delivery models.

Grit Daily: You’ve had a lot to say about diversity and inclusion. How do those values shape your management of Zensa, the team you put together, and your interactions with your clients and your companies?

Prerna Goja: Accessibility, diversity, inclusion, and equity are critical to who we are as a company, what we stand for, and how we operate our business. Zensa is a woman-owned diversity business and from the beginning, these have been important values for us, we have expanded upon them in both our services and our products.

Early on we started with cultivating a deeply human-centric model for everything, from customer experience to the products we develop, and services we provide and that’s something we took to our customers as well, we have a strong team of designers, developers, testers, and program managers that worked with All Inclusive Design process which built a solid foundation for an accessibility-first approach at Zensa and with our customers.

We absolutely think diversity builds opportunities – opportunities to develop better products for ALL. As a company, we have created an ecosystem around us where being different together is how we define success.

Grit Daily: Business and technology are more internationalized than people who aren’t employed in it realize. What are your thoughts about that as an Indian woman who has worked internationally and now runs a tech business in America?

Prerna Goja: Excellent question; you are right. I am a woman of Indian origin who was born and raised there. Later, I relocated to live and work in different countries, experiencing and celebrating various places and cultures, eventually, I founded Zensa which is headquartered in America with a global presence.

I think that despite the diversity and global reach of the modern world and its consumers, innovation, and technology are bringing people closer together. It’s remarkable to see how much the world has changed in the last few years, but technology’s rapid advancement has brought us closer together than ever. Technology helps us coordinate, connect and engage better across the world.

My experiences with different cultures and nations made me realize that we all share a common value—the desire to lead with purpose—which is what connects us together through technology. Our shared goal is to use technology and innovation to produce better results so that we can develop solutions that will benefit individuals, businesses, and countries. And to me, that has been the most rewarding part of my journey.