What I am building

DIVVIB Lifestyle Private Limited was incorporated in Gurugram in 2024 and trades as DharmikVibes. It is recognised as a startup by the Government of India under DPIIT. I joined as cofounder at the end of August 2026.

What is being built is not an app. It is three things at once: an economy, an experience and a layer of trust.

The economy already exists. It is the one that runs around a temple town, priests and poojaris, artisans, flower sellers, guides, drivers, satvik kitchens, homestays, and it runs mostly on cash and word of mouth. It is local enterprise, employment and tourism that nobody accounts for as an economy. Bringing it online is less about adding a marketplace than about making the livelihood in it steady and visible, particularly for the women who carry most of it.

The experience is phygital by necessity, not by fashion. A darshan happens in a physical place, on a date the calendar picks rather than one the devotee picked. The software cannot replace that, so it has to meet it: book the slot, arrange the bed near the temple, get the family there, and then get out of the way.

Trust is the hardest of the three, and it is the actual product. A devotee is not buying a listing. They are asking whether a ritual will be performed properly, by someone qualified to perform it, on the right date, and whether the offering they paid for reached the deity. Most of our work is the unglamorous supply side of that question: verifying pandits, gurus, astrologers and poojaris, mapping temples and the rules each one keeps, holding a catalogue of rituals that stays correct across four faiths and fifteen languages, routing special-entry darshan through official temple channels rather than around them, and settling money to thousands of small partners on time. The apps are the visible tenth of it.

The ecosystem is connected on purpose. The devotee app, the partner platform, the darshan, stay and travel portals and the yatra guides all share one map of temples and one partner record, so someone onboarded for a puja can take a yatra booking without being onboarded twice, and a devotee who books a darshan can find a bed beside it. That constraint costs us speed on any single product and is the reason the whole thing holds together.

Two things make this market hard and both are why it is worth doing. The first is that trust is not transferable: a devotee will not accept a pandit because an app ranked him highly, so verification has to be real and has to be defensible to a family elder. The second is that the calendar, not the customer, decides demand. Load arrives in spikes on dates fixed years in advance, which punishes anything built for smooth traffic and rewards anything built to hold a festival.

AI belongs in this quietly. It is useful for understanding a request in the language it was made in, for matching a ritual to the right practitioner, and for taking paperwork off a small partner's hands. It is not useful as a chatbot standing between a person and their faith, and we do not ship it that way.