’98Curiosity
A small town, a second-hand computer, a Sunday newspaper.
Childhood in Odisha. I take apart cassette players. I learn to read the business
section before the cartoons. Nothing of consequence happens, except the formation of a temperament.
’13Engineering
College. Four friends. One borrowed laptop.
Engineering by day, building by night. The internet is suddenly cheap. The country
is suddenly online. I am suddenly convinced I will not have a normal job.
’16atCampus
My first company. A campus life network for Indian colleges.
We sign up nine campuses. We learn product, distribution, friendship and
disagreement. We do not learn how to make money. The company quietly winds down — and three of the four
founders are still in my corner today. I count that as the only real metric.
’18The quiet year
A year of reading, freelancing and listening to manufacturers.
I spend most of it in industrial estates across Odisha and Andhra. I write a
notebook full of conversations with SME founders. India’s manufacturing backbone is held together by
trust, paper and phone calls. I want to build for them.
’19ManuAdda
A B2B marketplace for India’s small & medium manufacturers.
A modern alternative to the WhatsApp-and-spreadsheet stack most SMBs live in. We
learn that software does not get adopted because it is good. It gets adopted because it earns the right to
be opened on Monday morning.
’20The pivot
COVID. Hotels are closing. A friend calls.
A boutique hotel in Puri cannot reopen without contactless menus, ordering and
payments. We ship a prototype in nine days. QRcodx is born — not from a deck, but from a phone call at 11
p.m.
’21QRcodx grows
Hospitality tech, in earnest.
We onboard hotels, resorts and restaurants across India. We learn the strange,
beautiful operations of a 14-room boutique property and a 400-room chain. Hospitality teaches me everything
I now believe about AI: the best interface is the one that disappears.
’23Re-thinking
I close the door for six months and read.
Krishnamurti, Don Norman, Stewart Brand, Naval, Daniel Kahneman, R.K. Narayan. I
write three drafts of a manifesto. I throw away the first two. I realise the company I want to build next is
not a feature on top of an old idea — it is a new posture.
’24Sulopa
Sulopa Technologies. A studio. An AI-native thesis.
Sulopa is the home for everything I want to build for the rest of my career. Half
product company, half quiet research lab. The first products: Lopaa and Hirepool.
’25Lopaa & Hirepool
Private betas. Slow growth. Loud signal.
Lopaa enters private beta. Hirepool starts placing its first hires. We are
deliberately small. We are talking to fewer customers, more deeply. The metrics that matter are getting
better in the right order.
’26Now
A clearer sentence: human-first AI, built from India, for the world.
Public conversations. A first round of capital, on terms I am proud of. A team I
would happily spend the next decade with. The chapter I have been preparing for since I was 19.