I'm Himanshu. I'm 21, and I run Marl Studio, which builds software and its distribution together. Before that I was CTO at AuraX, built agents at Elip AI (YC W25), and grew SynthAILabs to 11,000+ students.
Each time, the model was the easy part. What took the work was everything around it: memory, routing, money, and getting the thing to people.
The problem. AI has made software cheap to build, so distribution is the moat. A studio that ships has to get just as good at getting things to people.
What I'm building.ashlar, a Rust app framework where every action is a command an AI agent can run. On it, Bay and Bay Effects: free AI video and motion graphics editors for Mac, Windows and Linux, shipping a release every two to three days. Marl GTM automates our Instagram go-to-market. Next is hull, a game engine in beta, with Shroud live and Pacenote coming soon.
What it's teaching me. When everyone agrees distribution is the moat, being good at GTM stops being one. What compounds is distribution built into the product: every Bay project file someone shares is a working demo.
The problem. The tools that make quant research honest (real tick data, Monte Carlo and walk-forward testing) cost hedge-fund money, so most retail traders never get to test an idea properly.
What I built. A strategy lab that tested 480 rule-based ideas on gold, USDJPY and the Nasdaq-100 using real tick data, and kept the few that held up on out-of-sample years. The gold portfolio backtest covers 2,164 trades over 2015 to 2025 at a profit factor of 1.28. Out of it came Qubit Trade Manager, an MT5 trading panel with 600+ downloads on MQL5 and no marketing.
How it works.Qubit Quant Global gives those tools away, along with an MT5 report analyser, and earns from the Expert Advisors it builds and runs itself. Every number it publishes traces to a raw MT5 report. We test on our own money before we ask for yours.
The problem. Job hunting is mostly logistics, and Elip had to handle it inside WhatsApp: one text box, no settings, no forms, and a tired person on the other end.
What I built. A FastAPI agent with a router and specialist sub-agents for resumes, reviews and job matching, with memory across Redis, Postgres and S3. Under it, hybrid search on OpenSearch over Go services indexing jobs from about 60 ATS platforms and job boards.
What it taught me. None of the hard parts were model problems. They were memory, deterministic routing, and knowing when a requirement is a filter rather than a similarity score.
A router that occasionally decides to freestyle is a router that occasionally loses someone's resume.
The problem. Fashion e-commerce needs on-model photos of every garment, in every size, on every body type. A photoshoot per SKU does not scale.
What I built. An aesthetic fine-tuning loop for fashion images: generate, score for aesthetics and garment accuracy, feed the scores back, repeat. In blind tests, people picked ours as real over Google's and OpenAI's image models. On Nautinati, Aditya Birla Fashion's kidswear brand, our images got a 3% click-through rate, against 1.5% for studio shoots. The try-on research is written up as Flux-VTON+.
How it ended. We raised ₹22 lakh from IIIT Hyderabad's CIE, IIM Bangalore's NSRCEL and MeitY's TIDE 2.0, and closed deals with Mensa Brands and Aditya Birla Fashion. When the next round didn't come in time and the big labs moved in, we turned down ₹28.5 lakh more. It would have kept us alive, not ahead. The full story.
The problem. Engineering students with the ability but not the ramp take far too long to become employable.
What I built. Free AI-made learning material built around projects, which grew into a community of 11,000+ students. Alongside it I co-founded OpenCode Developers, a club that took 500+ students through competitive programming in one summer instead of the usual six months.
How it ended. I wanted it to stay non-profit and couldn't fund it, so I wound it down.
Marl Studio is my full-time work, and I take on a few freelance builds and advisory roles alongside it: Rust desktop apps, AI agents and image models, or go-to-market for a product that already works. Start with a 15-minute intro call, or write to hyattherate2005@gmail.com.
