hey, i'm Tushar 🙋🏻♂️
i'm a founder, writer and bathroom singer
currently building a research & deployment lab out of Bangalore and SF
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, we also had a supply chain business for organic produce, and that was India's one of the first businesses in this space. we were profitable, and we were expanding to a couple of cities. but we were so naive right out of the college and did not understand how to scale operationally heavy businesses at multiple places and failed miserably.
..and even before that, while I was in college, along with some of my batchmates i ran an custom software agency.
i always feel that human beings 'trying' is a beautiful thing, and i'll keep on trying to create, to build, to experiment, to enjoy, to try, to dream, to empathize and to love in whatever capacity that i can.
my life so far is little comfortable, little sorrow. it threw tons of problems at me - and it still does while building vaani - but i believe that's what will make reading my story much more interesting.
see you on the other side slick!
Tushar