Driving intelligent devices at the edge of innovation
We have yet another expert for a better tomorrow we would like you to meet. This time it’s Kavya Patnaik, who leads AI and edge device development at Sigma Connectivity in Lund. With a career spanning multiple countries and disciplines, she works at the forefront of making technology smarter, more efficient, and closer to everyday use.
Kavya has built an international career across India, Denmark, and Finland. She holds a master’s degree in embedded systems from the University of Leicester in the UK and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from India. Her professional journey began in engineering but quickly expanded into roles such as scrum master and team leader, giving her both technical depth and leadership experience early on.
Her career has taken her through several global organizations. Getting a job at Danfoss in Denmark was her first experience working in Scandinavia, followed by a role at Sandvik, where she built and led a software development team in India. She was later asked to lead one of their product line development teams in Finland, where she spent more than three years, further strengthening her international experience.
Kavya also explored entrepreneurship, starting her own company focused on AI-based emotional intelligence. This marked her first hands-on experience in building AI solutions from the ground up. After a few years, she was ready for a new challenge and joined Sigma Connectivity, attracted by the wide range of clients, industries, and technologies the company engages with.
Outside of engineering, Kavya has a creative background as a trained classical dancer, a discipline she practiced for over a decade. While that part of her life is less visible today, it continues to influence how she approaches problem-solving, blending structure with creativity and discipline with adaptability.
Today, Kavya leads teams working across both AI model development and deployment on edge devices. At Sigma Connectivity, the starting point is often device development, where customers are looking to make their products more intelligent, whether through data collection, analytics, or integrating AI directly on the device.
Her team starts by assessing where each company stands in its digitalization journey. For some, the challenge begins at a very early stage, where data is not yet available to train models. In those cases, the work starts with data generation and structuring. For others, it may involve developing and training models tailored to specific use cases.
In more advanced cases, companies may already have AI models in place but need support in deploying them efficiently on edge devices. This brings a different set of challenges, including limitations in power, memory, and processing capacity. Kavya’s team focuses on optimizing these solutions to ensure that AI can run effectively even on small, resource-constrained hardware.
By working across all these stages, from initial assessment to deployment, her team supports customers at multiple entry points, adapting the approach depending on their level of maturity and technical needs.
Kavya’s expertise lies in bridging the gap between advanced AI models and real-world applications. By combining knowledge of software, hardware, and system design, she helps bring intelligent functionality into everyday products.
What drives her is the potential of AI to create meaningful impact in daily life. She sees the greatest opportunities not only in large-scale innovations, but in making common devices, such as household appliances, more intelligent and efficient, enabling them to take on more tasks independently, saving time so people can focus on thinking, creating, and what matters most.