👤 About the Founder

April 9, 2026 · View on GitHub

Neha Dangwal

Founder & Architect, SentryNode Gateway

Fractional AI Architect | Patent-Pending IP (#63/982,542) | $17M+ Impact @ Cisco & Dell

"Using a Frontier Model for basic text classification is like taking an Uber Black to check your mailbox. It’s not just a cost leak; it’s an architectural failure."

🏗️ The Professional Journey: From Bare Metal to Agentic Logic

Neha is a "Systems-First" architect with 9 years of deep-stack engineering at Cisco and Dell. Her career is defined by hardening infrastructure that stays efficient under extreme global scale.

Cisco (Senior Software Engineer / Platform Product Owner): Led platform strategy for cloud-based security infrastructure adopted by 80+ products. Managed feature alignment for Meraki and SaaS platforms supporting 11.5M+ active devices globally, delivering $15M+ in productivity gains.
Dell EMC (Senior Software Engineer): Built Dell’s first on-prem GPU cloud service. Architected thermal and firmware systems that compressed hardware review cycles from weeks to seconds and refactored legacy systems to reduce boot times by 44%.
The Transition: Before founding SentryNode Gateway, she built TrainOps Observatory, a tool that identified hidden I/O bottlenecks in ML training, saving engineers an estimated $15K/year per head through simple 5-minute configuration fixes.

🚀 The SentryNode Gateway Vision: Inference Governance

Neha founded SentryNode Gateway to dismantle the "AI Tax"—the 80% waste generated when teams treat LLM APIs as "black boxes" rather than governed infrastructure.

Technical Milestones (U.S. Patent Pending #63/982,542):

77.6% Cost Reduction: Validated through 1,000-request stress tests, reducing costs from $5.00/1k requests to $1.12/1k requests.
Adaptive Inference Routing: Real-time semantic analysis that identifies prompt complexity and intercepts "Agentic Drift" (recursive loops) in <40ms.
Shadow Mode Mirroring: A "Teacher-Student" arbitrage system ensuring 98.2% quality parity by validating SLM responses against Frontier models in the background.
Sovereign Execution Layer: Leveraging gVisor-hardened sidecars and HMAC-SHA256 cryptographic signatures to ensure every AI response is auditable, signed, and isolated from the core VPC.

🗣️ Thought Leadership & Community Reach

Neha is a leading voice in Inference-Level Sovereignty, moving the conversation from "Model FOMO" to "Technical Sovereignty."

Community Validation: Her research has reached 9,100+ impressions in the past 90 days. She is a featured contributor in the FinOps Connect community, leading discussions on Agentic Unit Economics.
The ROI Engine: Creator of the 2026 AI Tax Calculator, a public tool helping AI companies quantify "silent bleed" and move from "AI Demos" to "Enterprise-ready Production."
Founder Ecosystem: Actively participating in the YC Co-Founder Matching program, seeking a strategic partner to scale SentryNode Gateway’s Enterprise footprint and dismantle the "AI Tax" at a global level.
The Philosophy: "We are architecting the floor for the AI ceiling. Efficiency is the only moat that lasts."

🔗 Connect & Collaborate

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/nehadangwal
GitHub: github.com/nehadangwal/sentrynode-gateway
Research: The AI Tax: A $17M FinOps Perspective
Email: nehadangwal@sentrynodegateway.com