About / Bilal Ahmed
Bilal Ahmed
Founder & CEO, Grotabyte — building email archiving and eDiscovery since 2013
Bilal Ahmed is the founder and CEO of Grotabyte, and the engineer behind the product. He has spent over a decade building email archiving and eDiscovery systems for regulated organizations — first on-premise, now in the cloud.
Before Grotabyte, he was Chief Technology Officer at Sonasoft (SSFT), where he led development of the SonaVault email archiving and eDiscovery product: journaling capture from Exchange and Office 365, retention enforcement, and machine-assisted document classification for legal review. In 2020 he acquired that archiving software and founded Grotabyte around it.
That history is why Grotabyte behaves the way it does. The same build deploys on-premise or in the cloud because he spent years shipping the on-premise version to organizations that could not use anything else — and the product says where its limits are because he has been on the other side of the audit that finds them.
Background
- Founder & CEO, Grotabyte — designed and built the Grotabyte cloud archive
- Former CTO, Sonasoft (SSFT) — led development of the SonaVault on-premise email archiving and eDiscovery product
- Acquired the SonaVault archiving software in 2020 and founded Grotabyte around it
- 13+ years building journaling capture, retention enforcement, legal hold and eDiscovery review systems
What this experience covers
Bilal writes here as a practitioner: he has built the systems that capture, preserve, search and produce records under SEC 17a-4, FINRA, HIPAA, FOIA, GDPR and comparable regimes. He is an engineer and operator, not an attorney, and nothing on this site is legal advice.
In the press
Independent coverage quoting Bilal on email archiving and eDiscovery.