Hard ground, and how long I stayed on it
Kharagpur, then tutoring, then dating, then insurance, and now devotion. What connects them is never the sector. It is the kind of market: trust, cash, people and physical ground, where nothing moves until somebody at the far end believes you.
I have been starting things since Kharagpur in 2007, and the habit is to stay on one long after the interesting part is over.
Where the years went
Acquired by RenewBuy, February 2022 Confirmed dates Approximate dates My roles after the sale The RenewBuy group after the sale The company before I joined it Just begun, too recent to draw as a span
The markets underneath those years. Take one and the bars it came from will light up on the chart above.
How one thing led to the next
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 product it grew into. Both were really the same business: take what you know about a person, take what you know about everybody else, and decide who belongs with whom. By 2016 and 2017 the commercial reading was plain. What we had was worth far more pointed at an industry that pays for a decision than at an audience that will not, and judging a person against a person is not far from judging a person against a risk.
That became Artivatic.ai, and the business was never the technology. It was a bet that an Indian insurer would let a machine make decisions it had always made by hand: who to cover, which claim to pay, which one to look at twice. We sold the decision itself rather than a system to run it in, so a company could change one step without rebuilding the twenty around it. That is a commercial argument before it is an engineering one, and it is the reason the sale closed at all. RenewBuy acquired the company in February 2022 and I stayed for another four and a half years. From 2023 I took the business outside India, into South Africa, the United States, the Middle East and the Philippines. On 31 August 2026 RenewBuy and InsuranceDekho came together under Artivatic as the holding company, and I left the executive role that day, eight years after founding it, staying on as an advisor to the group. What those years taught me had almost nothing to do with models. Getting a regulated incumbent to change one step of a process it already ran was the constraint every time, and the move that worked was commercial rather than technical.
Which is why DharmikVibes goes straight to the person who has the need. Devotion is the largest recurring behaviour in India that nobody has ever organised as an economy. 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, and to make the money reach the smallest party in it on time.
If there is a line through it, it is this. Build for people who are already doing the thing, and take the friction out of it rather than telling them to do it differently.
What that looks like now is on what I am building. The sectors I take advisory work in, each tied to the business it came out of, are on advising.
Devotion, and the money underneath it
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India's devotional economy, taken seriously as an economy: darshan and puja, verified pandits and astrologers, pilgrimage, a daily Gita practice, and the partner side that decides whether any of it is worth doing twice. Trading as DIVVIB Lifestyle Private Limited, incorporated in Gurugram in 2024. Operations began in August 2025. I joined as Co-Founder in September 2026 and I am building it now.
The test is whether a pandit in a small town is paid on the day he was told he would be paid. Everything else is downstream of that.
Highways and power, where I advise rather than run
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RODIC Consultants
Advisor on AI, product and strategy From August 2026Highways, bridges, tunnels, metro and roads, and power and energy. I advise RODIC Consultants and RODIC Digital. These are not companies I run and the projects are not mine; what I am asked for is judgement about what to build, what it is worth automating and what a client will actually use.
It is a different discipline to anything consumer. The client is often a government, the feedback loop runs in years rather than weeks, and the information arrives from a site inspection rather than from a browser. It is also the clearest case of the thing I keep finding: the data exists, the constraint is whether anyone on the ground trusts it enough to act on it.
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Artivatic
Advisor to the group From September 2026The executive role ended on 31 August 2026. I still advise the group on the platform I founded. I do not run it and I do not speak for it.
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Advisory roles with early-stage startups and NGOs
Early-stage startups and NGOs September 2026 →Product, go-to-market and AI systems for founders; governance and digital programmes for non-profits. The organisations: Artivatic.ai (Advisor, from September 2026); RODIC Consultants (AI, product and strategy advisor, from August 2026); Inspiring Senior Foundation (Advisor, from September 2026). A small number at a time. How to reach me for this.
Teaching an insurer to trust a decision it did not make
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Cofounded with Puneet Tandon, and sold to insurers, brokers, reinsurers and health partners in India and outside it. What we sold was the decision itself, not a system to run it in: who to cover, what the risk was worth, which claim to pay and which one to look at twice. A buyer could change one step of a process it already ran without replacing the twenty around it, and that commercial shape, more than anything in the technology, is why a regulated incumbent was willing to sign. That argument is the one I carried into the first rooms myself, and it is what the early contracts were signed on. Then I hired the people who had to make it true. By the end it reached 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 stayed on for another four years and seven months, on strategy, product and growth, and I still advise the group. That meant the move to SaaS and the GenAI layer over the original models. From 2023 it also meant taking the business outside India, into South Africa, the United States, the Middle East and the Philippines. A decision sold to a regulated buyer travels better than most Indian products do, because the paperwork it removes looks much the same in Johannesburg as it does in Mumbai.
What happened next is the group'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 on 31 August 2026 the two came together under Artivatic as the holding company, with the group going to market as InsuranceDekho. I left the executive role the same day, eight years after starting it, and I advise the group now. The sequence is here because it is where the thing we built ended up. 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.
Three that closed, and what they cost me to learn
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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.
What it taught: in a network, what you are selling is the confidence to meet a stranger. Everything else is packaging.
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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.
It ended in September 2016 and it is on this page for that reason. What it taught was worth more than what it earned: we were holding something an industry would pay for and an audience would not, and the only useful answer to that is to move.
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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.
What it taught: a record nobody is obliged to keep does not get kept. The habit has to come from somewhere other than the product asking for it.
Charging for work before I had a company
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iwanttutor and eStudyCorner
Founder January 2011 to August 2012Online tutoring and education businesses, 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.
What it taught: a parent in a small town pays in cash, immediately, for a thing that works, and never a second time for one that does not.
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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.
What it taught: charge before the thing is finished. It is the only funding that never asks for a board seat.
Kharagpur, and before it
- 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