Himanshu

In my 2nd year at NIT Kurukshetra, I started SynthAiLabs (OpenEdu) — part startup, part movement. I hand-selected 500 students from 2,000 and built an accelerated learning community. Students were completing 6 months of curriculum in just 2.

The revenue model was B2B: companies could distribute coupons to students, and I'd sell outsourced learning materials and software to companies training their employees. But funds were always the bottleneck.

What happened after I stopped was the real validation— juniors restarted and continued it on their own. It had given them something worth continuing.

I co-founded AuraX, a fashion-tech startup incubated at IIIT-Hyderabad's CIE. We researched diffusion models for virtual try-on and built a pipeline that outperformed Google, Stable Diffusion, and every Indian competitor in quality benchmarks.

We signed a deal with Aditya Birla Fashion Group and several brands under Mensa Brands. Real revenue. Real contracts.

But the space moved fast. Larger players with deeper pockets entered. We ran out of runway. I made the call to close AuraX — not because the tech failed, but because the timing wasn't on our side.

After closing AuraX, I took intentional time off. I studied finance to understand the business mistakes I'd made. I focused on health — something I'd ignored for two years of building.

Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is stop.

Now I'm an SDE at Tejas AI (YC W25) — building WhatsApp-based AI agents with persistent memory, a scraping pipeline that ingests at scale, and OpenSearch-backed retrieval for real-time matching.

On the side: open-source tooling, a personal infra rebuild, and the essays I never had time to write while running AuraX.