Headline

tal’s brain since v0.0.1. he’s on v47 now. I aged.

About

I studied Psychology at Ashoka University simply because I was fascinated by why people do what they do. After graduation, I did the sensible things. I worked in strategy consulting at Zinnov and then at Wadhwani AI (where I helped raise $10M+ for AI-for-good). While I learned a lot, the biggest takeaway was realizing I genuinely loved working in small teams. I wanted to be where the building happens, not just the planning. That clarity is what pulled me toward the startup world. I went to Mesa School of Business to make that transition. Along the way, I spent some time at Elevation Capital, which gave me a helpful perspective on how businesses are built. But I found my real footing at Grapevine (Peak XV). I joined as an intern, fell in love with the chaos of building 0-to-1, and haven't looked back. I think a lot about how products should feel. I wrote about it in The Joy Thesis if you're curious. When I'm not working, I'm probably writing, building something for fun, or falling into a new rabbit hole about LLMs.

Location

India

AI stack

antigravity

codex

cursor

Work experience

Product Lead & Member of Technical Staff at tal (by Grapevine), Oct 2025 - Present · 10 mos, On-site

Founding Product Manager at tal (by Grapevine), Mar 2025 - Oct 2025 · 8 mos, Bengaluru, ~ The role didn't exist before me, which was either exciting or a red flag ~ Picked up coding after a 3-year gap and immediately started pretending I never stopped ~ Built and scaled Round1 AI to 100K interviews ~ Saumil said "build TAL" - so I did ~ AI at 25% of workflows. Progress.

Product Intern at tal (by Grapevine), Dec 2024 - Mar 2025 · 4 mos, On-site, ~ Learned a lot - mostly that product is where I'm supposed to be ~ Spent most of my time in Product Ops and stared at Mixpanel until it started making sense ~ Quietly started using AI for 10% of my work before it was a personality trait

Intern at Elevation Capital, Sep 2024 - Dec 2024 · 4 mos, Bengaluru, > Researching and understanding founder perceptions across Consumer brands, Consumer tech, Enterprise & Fintech sectors towards Tier 1 funds, VC & Angel fundraising. > Built a Report highlighting the landscape and our findings post evaluation.

Associate - Strategy, Fundraising and Partnerships at Wadhwani AI, Jun 2023 - Jul 2024 · 1 yr 2 mos, On-site, In my role as an Associate at Wadhwani AI, I successfully led grant proposals raising over $10 million for the AI for Social Impact initiative. Additionally, I developed relationships with global institutional philanthropic funds and lead the grants that secured a $3.3 million grant from Google.org for a National Pest Surveillance System and $1.5 million grant from Walmart Foundation for AI Grain Analyzer.

Associate Consultant - Investments, Open Innovation & Strategy at Zinnov, Jul 2022 - Jun 2023 · 1 yr, Gurgaon & Bangalore, In my role at Zinnov, I developed investment theses for clean energy projects, executed successful acqui-hiring strategies, and evaluated startups for industry reports and competitions. • Crafted investment thesis for a Japanese sogo shosha. • Executed acqui-hiring strategy for an International financial services giant. • Contributed to Zinnov-NASSCOM Startup report 2023.

Intern - Foundations (ACT Grants) at Sattva Consulting, Dec 2021 - Feb 2022 · 3 mos, New Delhi, Delhi, India, • Scouted 50+ high-impact innovations in the healthcare sector for ACT for health grants. • Spearheaded data analysis of ACT vaccine beneficiaries; shared randomly sampled data with last-mile callers to flag any post-dose reaction among beneficiaries. • Implemented an app script to automate the creation of acknowledgment receipts for vehicles carrying covid relief donations; boosted the efficiency of the pipeline by 98%.

Education

Bachelor of Science - BS, Ashoka University

PG Program in Startup Leadership, Business Administration and Management, General (MBA), Mesa School of Business

Profile highlights

What I'm currently working on: scaling tal from v0.0.1 to v47, obsessing over how our AI agent feels to users, and finding the sweet spot between human intuition and LLMs.

what i've built with AI: I’m currently iterating on tal, turning an LLM into a sharp, opinionated agent that actually understands how to navigate the Indian startup ecosystem.