About CultureLab 360

We built what was
missing.

Most culture solutions are built for HR teams. We built this for founders and scaling companies — a direction, a methodology, and a platform that turns culture into a competitive edge.

We met here. At 17,000 feet, 2 travellers. 3 years later CultureLab 360 was born.

Why we exist

The story behind it.

Every company we built, led, or worked inside had the same pattern. Culture wasn’t the soft thing on the side — it was the operating system. The invisible force that determined how decisions got made under pressure, how people showed up when no one was watching, whether talent stayed or quietly disengaged.

We watched it happen repeatedly across industries, company sizes, and leadership styles. The organisations that treated culture as infrastructure — as something to design, build, and maintain — performed differently. Not marginally. Structurally differently.

“The organisations that got culture right didn’t spend more. They stopped treating interventions as events — and stopped wasting spend on half the story.”

And yet everywhere we looked, the solutions on offer were either tech platforms measuring symptoms without treating causes, or consultancies deploying frameworks built by people who’d never actually run anything.

We kept having the same conversation: organisations that genuinely wanted to get culture right, but didn’t have the methodology to do it. A survey wasn’t going to fix it. A workshop wouldn’t either — not on its own.

So we built CultureLab 360. Not as a consultancy that advises from the outside. Not as a platform that generates dashboards. As the thing we wished had existed when we were the ones in the room making the calls — a proprietary methodology, grounded in lived experience, powered by real insights, and built to create change that actually sticks.

Our founding belief

"The distance between the values on your wall and the decisions in your rooms — that's your real culture."

— The insight behind everything we build

The work behind the work

Months of curation..
Years of experience..

Value Architecture™ didn’t emerge from a book or a business school. It came from hundreds of conversations, years of field-testing, and the honest patterns that show up in every organisation we’ve worked with.

Hundreds of structured interviews

Hours of conversations with founders, CHROs, managers, and individual contributors — across industries, company sizes, and cultures. What actually works. What doesn’t. Why. All of it fed the methodology.

Research-backed methodology

Value Architecture™ layers lived operator experience over academic research, behavioural science, and field observation. Every pillar is rooted in evidence. Every intervention has been tested under real pressure — not in a pilot programme.

Tested inside real organisations

Everything we deliver has been stress-tested inside actual organisations with real stakes, real managers, and real moments of friction. Not in theory. In the actual work of building companies people want to work in.

The Team

Founded by practitioners, not theorists

CultureLab 360 was built from two decades of doing the work inside organisations — before any of it became a consultancy. That means every tool, framework, and intervention has been tested under real pressure.

Aarati Kumar

Co-Founder · Culture Strategist · Operator

Aarati Kumar did not come to culture as a concept. She came to it as a problem — a daily operational reality inside companies she was building from zero.

When she co-founded MattsenKumar, she made culture decisions before she had a name for them. Who to hire when the instinct said no. How to handle a senior leader whose performance was excellent but whose behaviour was poisoning the team. What to do in the moments when values and commercial pressure pointed in different directions. Over two decades, she drove customer strategy for elite global brands including Microsoft and The Oberoi Group — building a rare double perspective on what makes culture shift on the client side, and what makes it hold internally, and the sharp correlation between both. Three companies built from the ground up. Thousands of people. The same pattern, every time: culture either compounds success or quietly unravels it.

“I didn’t learn this from a framework. I learned it from the cost of getting it wrong — and the compounding return of getting it right.”

Aarati grew up inside the Indian Air Force. Her father’s postings moved the family across India throughout her childhood — each base its own culture, its own rhythms, its own unspoken social rules. She learned early that you couldn’t afford to be rigid when everything around you kept shifting. That agility shaped how she navigated corporate India through the 90s and early 2000s: building client relationships that felt genuinely personal rather than transactional, and keeping large, complex teams performing consistently across industries and environments. Having navigated multiple cultures, geographies, and contexts from childhood, she carries an adaptability advantage that no classroom can replicate.

At CultureLab 360, Aarati brings the operator’s perspective — what it actually feels like to be the person accountable for culture inside a growing organisation. Not consulting on it from the outside. Not measuring it from a dashboard. Living with the consequences of every decision about how people are led, recognised, developed, and let go. She speaks the business language that makes culture shift measurable and simultaneously strategic — while never losing the human thread that makes it actually move.

Shilpi Singh

Co-Founder · Executive Coach · DEI Practitioner

Shilpi Singh’s career has never followed a single line. HR leader. Leadership coach. DEI practitioner. Travel entrepreneur. Digital nomad. Co-founder. And for a significant chapter — innkeeper to the world.
In an age where the portfolio career is becoming the norm, this spread turns out to be the asset.

Before boutique hospitality had a name in India, Shilpi co-founded The Unhotel Co and ran a premium homestay in Gurgaon — the country’s hub for startups and corporates. Her guests were founders, CEOs, org heads, teams mid-pivot.
That gave her a front-row seat to how people actually think – what motivates them, what engages them, how purpose shows up differently across cultures, and how founders differ in the way they see culture inside their own organisations. Years of watching this up close, unfiltered, played a critical role in building her unbiased read on human behaviour.

Eighteen years of coaching, facilitation, and DEI work gave her another layer of the same truth: culture operates like an iceberg. What you see is behaviour, what sits below the surface, invisible and far larger, is what actually drives it: the beliefs, assumptions, and unspoken rules people don’t even know they’re carrying. Most culture work only ever touches the visible tenth. Hers starts below the waterline.

“You can tell me your values in one line. Show me your last hard decision, and I’ll tell you your real ones.”

At CultureLab 360, Shilpi carries the methodology — the frameworks, the facilitation design, the listening architecture. What she brings to a room is the ability to makepeople see what they cannot see from inside their own problem, and to turn that into actionable habits driving sustainable impact.

What Clients Say

Proof in the work

Enterprise Leader

"I've built a company with Aarati. I know what she looks like under pressure, at scale, and when the decisions are genuinely hard. Culture wasn't something she talked about — it was something she did, every day, in every room. The attrition numbers proved it. The client relationships proved it. CultureLab 360 is that same thinking, available to every organisation that's serious about it."

Mike Mattsen

Former CEO & Co-Founder, MattsenKumar

Technology Leader

"I've built companies from napkins to NASDAQ. In that journey, the single biggest differentiator between teams that scale and teams that stall is culture — and I've watched most founders underestimate it until it's already costing them. In an early company I founded, Aarati was an early member of my India team and went on to build it into a leading operation. The revenue growth was real. But what made it sustainable was the culture underneath it — the relationships it created with clients, the retention it drove internally. She didn't just manage a business. She built the conditions for one to thrive. The Value Architecture model she and Shilpi have built at CultureLab 360 is a genuine game-changer for any company serious about scaling — it gives you the language, the structure, and the measurement that most fast-growing organisations are desperately missing."

Howard Lee

CEO Sorse Technologies

Scaling technology company

"For the first time, our leadership team said the same thing about what our culture actually is — not what we wished it was. That's what the Listening Lab gave us."

Head of People

Amplify Programme

Professional services firm

"The Culture Sprint surfaced a generational tension we'd been managing around for two years. In one afternoon, we named it, mapped it, and agreed on what to do differently."

VP Human Resources

Generations Sprint

Consumer brand

"We'd done values exercises before. This was different. The Farmers Market auction showed us that what our people actually value and what we'd written on the wall were two completely different things."

Founder & CEO

Culture Toolkit

Two operators. One methodology. Real results.

Aarati brings the operator’s lens — what culture actually costs and compounds inside a growing organisation. Shilpi brings the human design philosophy — what it takes to create real, lasting behaviour change in the room.

Together, they built the thing they wished had existed. Not a consultancy that hands you a deck and leaves. Not a platform that tracks without acting. CultureLab 360 is where the rubber meets the road.

0 +Years

Combined operations and people leadership — inside real organisations

0 +Years

Of structured interviews that shaped Value Architecture™

0 Industries

Where the methodology has been tested and refined

0 Proprietary methodology

Built from scratch, not borrowed from a book

Ready to build culture that actually holds?

Start with a free 30-minute Culture Audit. We use our diagnostic to show you exactly where culture is working, where it’s drifting, and what to do first. No pitch. No deck. Just an honest conversation from people who’ve been in your seat.

30 minutes | No commitment | hello@culturelab360.com

We built what was missing.