hey, i'm Tushar 🙋🏻‍♂️

about me

right now, i'm the cofounder and CEO of Vaani AI Research, a foundation speech model & infrastructure company building highly data efficient Voice AI systems - so we can help nearly half the globe join the ai ecosystem with most natural form of communication i.e., your voice. In order to make it work, we had to work a lot on inventing a new compute efficient architecture and training algorithms while also making sure we end up making most of these things way more affordable for rest of the world. We are based out of HSR, Bangalore and now looking for a good place around Bay Area.

this is my third startup. before this, i spent my years building 2 startups as well as working in corporate for around 5 years.

i was an early PM at OneCard where i saw the company grow from 1 to 10 and then turning into a Unicorn. i handled the credit card portfolio spend of around $200m and a growth from 600K to 2 million users.

before that I was a data scientist (and later a PM) at Pubicis Groupe's Sapient unit, a third largest agency and media holding company in the world. i also managed the product at hypersonix ai, now a $200m company.

i've always been in and around tech and especially AI and CHAI (=tea, but in hindi) for the last 10 years since my academia.

my startup journey

if i go via a descending order, then before Vaani i did run a very successful tea cafeteria chain named 'Badnaam Chai' - With its literal meaning in hindi being 'A notoriously infamous tea'!! but contradictory to the name, at our peak we were selling around 25,000 cups of tea per month from every single shop that we had. All thanks to our creative marketing, relationship building skills, and a clever use of storytelling, social media and PR.

before that, i sold vegetables - every morning for almost a year. basically it was a supply chain business for organic produce, and that was probably India's one of the first businesses in this space. we were profitable, and we were expanding to a couple of cities. we used to sell those from house to house across the city using the solar-energy powered-rickshaw that we made in college. but as we were right out of the college and were so naive that we could not scale such an operationally heavy businesses. we failed miserably.

..and even before that, along with some of my batchmates i ran an custom software agency. built a lot of product which very few wanted. learnt an important lession about product building - make something people want. and this turned out to be a systematic art. which later helped me a lot in my product mgmt career. dots always connect in the hindsight, you see : )