From a small town in Tamil Nadu to building companies

What do you want to become?

I was born and brought up in a suburb in Tamil Nadu, India. Everyone asks a child what they want to become, and my answers kept changing. First I said politician: I wanted to be the Chief Minister, then the Prime Minister of India. Later it turned into medicine and becoming the dean of a hospital. Then a leader, then a businessman.

The job changed every time. The passion never did: I wanted to lead, not to obey someone.

A quiet student who kept winning

I won a gold medal in the International Mathematics Olympiad and a silver in the International Chemistry Olympiad, and I scored 1600 out of 1600 in the SAT.

I started grade 10 in 2018, at 13, and grade 12 in 2020, at 15. That put me ahead of most of my class in age.

I was never loud. I am quiet and distant, and from grade 8 to grade 12 a teacher, Sahitha Synab, helped me feel confident about who I was. She is the reason I could be myself at school.

First gigs, first rupees

At 13 I started freelancing in digital marketing and modelling. The modelling was cover photos, a few magazines and some clothing shoots. The digital marketing was where I saw something much bigger, so I went deeper into it. I started earning a thousand or two at a time, and I began teaching at the same time.

From 13 to 18 I managed social media for small celebrities. It was not glamorous, but it taught me to deliver, to communicate and to get paid.

Two years to understand myself

From 2021 to 2023 I took a two year gap. I tried several things. Medicine was one of them, and I realised it was not for me, because I did not want to earn my money through a service business.

What I found instead was fascination: with computers, with AI and programming, and with fashion. That is where I felt the money and the meaning were. During this time I finished a fashion diploma and a master level course in psychology and counselling, and I kept freelancing.

₹1 lakh a month in my first year

I did not go to a big college. I went to LPU, a tier three college, and in my first year I got a client who paid me ₹1 lakh every month to manage social media for a top Bollywood celebrity. At 19, that was huge.

I also started building websites for clients, from e-commerce to Shopify, working with businesses in the UAE, the Philippines, the USA, the UK and China. The biggest single project paid about ₹6 lakh. In one month of my second year, several clients together paid me ₹9 lakh.

In parallel I tutored. SAT, CBSE and GCSE for the UK syllabus, for students from the UK, the US, China, the Philippines and Zimbabwe. By my second year I charged around ₹4,000 per session.

The things that did not work

I tried to grow from a freelancer into an agency. It went smoothly for six months. The difference between freelancing and an agency is the number of people you depend on, and managing a team at that age was hard, even with good people. I ran it for a year and closed it.

In college I kept trying: PG room services, real estate, a T-shirt business, digital marketing, and GenA Agency, which failed too.

My grades paid for it as well. In my second and third semesters I got distracted by everything happening around me. I had always been a topper, and my CGPA fell as low as 7. I messed up, and I know it.

Every failure showed me where I was lagging and what to fix. That mattered more than any win.

Moving out, looking around

College took me to Punjab, and Punjab made me explore. I travelled all the way to Kashmir, and the trip became a reset: quiet gardens, apple orchards, boats on Dal Lake and a lot of time to think.

Placement or entrepreneurship?

I finished my third year in June 2026, and before that I had to choose: build my own thing or take a placement. I picked the placement because it felt safe, and it was the one time I did not push my limit.

My very first interview went badly. I failed it, and I am keeping the photo anyway.

Life had other plans. I joined Trafy, a tech startup, as an intern. On day one I told the CEO the plan was wrong and the product had to change. On day two he asked me to propose a new plan, and by that evening I had a full time offer. I counter offered with a founding member role, and by day three I had it.

The product I suggested changed Trafy's direction. I bought stakes in the company and became cofounder and CTO, and I also became a cofounder of stat6. I turned down a ₹36 LPA full time package to do it.

That was the start of my Chennai chapter, and the promotions came one after another: from intern to full time, to founding member, to cofounder and CTO.

Around the time I joined Trafy in Chennai, I recorded my first commercial podcast. I recorded two podcasts in the same session, and it went great.

Still recovering, one page at a time

I am not fully recovered, and I will not pretend otherwise. I am recovering, and reading is a big part of it. I once had a library of 300 to 400 books, and I sourced and read them all by myself from many places.

The other half is fashion. I am a fashion addict. I have done many photo shoots and sourced rare pieces, including a Korean brand trench coat that was once worth about ₹8 lakh and a leather coat from Italy.

The people behind the story

Three companies, three different roles

I finished my third year in June 2026 and started my fourth in August. In between, the companies started.