Journey
The journey
Kharagpur, then education, then dating, then insurance, and now devotion. It looks like a wander. It is one line.
Nineteen years, drawn
Acquired by RenewBuy, February 2022 Confirmed dates Approximate dates Advising, not building The acquirer afterwards, as context The company before I joined it Just begun, too recent to draw as a span
The line
I went to IIT Kharagpur in 2007 to read manufacturing science and engineering, and I started my first business before I finished the degree, writing research for people who needed it written. It was not a company so much as proof that money would arrive if the work was good. That was the whole lesson and it was enough.
Education came next, properly, through iwanttutor and eStudyCorner and the company behind them. Tutoring taught me demand: a parent in a small town will pay for a thing that works, in cash, immediately, and will not pay twice for a thing that does not. Nothing I have built since has needed a more complicated theory of a customer than that one.
Then dating, which sounds like a swerve and was not. DateIITians was a closed network for IIT and IIM alumni, and Cogxio was the hyperlocal social product it grew into. Both were matching problems dressed as social products: take what you know about a person, take what you know about everyone else, and rank. Around 2016 and 2017 it became clear that the engine underneath was more interesting than the app on top of it, and that ranking a person against a person is not far from ranking a person against a risk.
That became Artivatic.ai. We sold underwriting, fraud and claims decisions to insurers and health partners as APIs, at a point when a lot of that work in India was still being done on paper by hand. It was acquired by RenewBuy in February 2022, and I still advise the leadership team. RenewBuy has since merged with InsuranceDekho, which is the acquirer's story and not mine. What I learned there was not about models. It was that the technology is almost never the constraint, and that getting a regulated incumbent to change one step of a process it already runs is the constraint, every single time.
Which is why DharmikVibes is built straight to the person who has the need. Devotion is the largest recurring behaviour in India that software has never taken seriously. There is no incumbent to persuade. There is a temple, a pandit and a family, and the work is to put something between them that is dignified enough that all three trust it.
The line, if there is one: build for people who are already doing the thing, and take the friction out of it rather than telling them to do it differently.
Devotion
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A devotional technology group: darshan and puja, verified pandits and astrologers, pilgrimage, a daily Gita practice, and the partner platform underneath all of it. Trading as DIVVIB Lifestyle Private Limited, which was incorporated in Gurugram in 2024. I joined as cofounder at the end of August 2026.
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Advising
Alongside DharmikVibes CurrentArtivatic.ai, as advisor, from August 2026; RODIC Consultants, as AI, product and strategy advisor, from August 2026. The advisory work is deliberately narrow: two companies, in sectors I have actually shipped into, rather than a long list of logos.
Insurance, health and AI
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An enterprise AI and GenAI platform for insurers, brokers, reinsurers and health partners, co-founded with Puneet Tandon. It sold decisions rather than the software around them: underwriting, risk scoring, fraud intelligence and claims adjudication, exposed as APIs an insurer could put behind a process it already ran, without replacing it. By the end it covered customer acquisition, lead management, underwriting, fraud and claims servicing across more than two hundred APIs. It was backed by the Indian Angel Network and Scale Ventures, among others.
Artivatic was acquired by RenewBuy in February 2022, in a deal reported at the time at about ten million dollars, in cash and a share swap. I remain an advisor to the leadership team. Most of my work since then has been the move to SaaS, the GenAI layer on top of the original models, and taking the platform outside India.
What happened next is RenewBuy's story rather than mine. RenewBuy signed a merger framework agreement with InsuranceDekho in May 2025, the Competition Commission of India cleared it in November 2025, and the combined group has been reported as preparing to list. I set it down because it is where the thing we built ended up, not as anything I am owed credit for. I sold a company; I am not taking one public.
The lesson was distribution. The technology was almost never the constraint. Getting a regulated incumbent to change one step of a process it already had was the constraint, every time.
Consumer and social
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DateIITians
Founder May 2012 to February 2013, relaunched 2016Dating for IIT and IIM alumni. A closed, verified network at a point when Indian dating products were open and unverified, which meant the whole product was really a trust problem wearing a matching problem's clothes. The ranking work inside it is where the recommendation engine that became Artivatic started.
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Cogxio
Founder March 2015 to September 2016Hyperlocal social discovery and dating, and the wider product that DateIITians grew into. In 2016 and 2017 the recommendation engine underneath it was pulled out and pointed at a different problem, which is the pivot that produced Artivatic.
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LiveOnGo
Founder Alongside CogxioA platform for logging what you actually do, across finance, health and daily activity, and turning that record into personal recommendations for lifestyle, travel and food. It ran alongside Cogxio, and it is the same instinct as the dating work seen from the other end: not matching two people, but matching a person to what they should do next.
Early ventures
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iwanttutor and eStudyCorner
Founder January 2011 to August 2012Online tutoring and education platforms, run through Fullerene Solutions and Services Private Limited. They started at Kharagpur and grew past India, which was the first time I had to build for a market I could not visit and could not phone during working hours.
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Edudigm
Entrepreneur in residence Kolkata, about ten months, during collegeBuilding a new kind of learning platform for schools and colleges, built around visual thinking rather than text on a page. It is the only role on this list I did not start myself, and it is where I learned what building inside somebody else's company feels like, which is most of why everything after it was my own.
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Rakins and LivingStylish
Founder At KharagpurA lifestyle and news magazine, started while I was still an undergraduate. It is the earliest thing on this page that involved an audience rather than a client, and the first time I had to think about why anyone would come back.
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Fullerene Solutions
Founder From before 2011A research writing business, and the first thing I started. It is also the entity the education products were later built under, so it is less a company that ended than the one everything else in this section came out of.
Where I studied
- 2007 to 2011
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B.Tech, Manufacturing Science and Engineering (Mechanical Engineering)
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur - 2004 to 2006
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Class XII
Radha Ballabh Intern College, Dayalbagh, Agra