~/himanshu
$whoami
Himanshu

Hyderabad, India·four chapters, newest last

About

The long version — what I built, what it cost, and what I learned closing a company I believed in.

01

2023 – 2024

Built a community that outlived me.

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.

02

2024 – 2026

Beat the benchmarks. Ran out of runway.

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, in our quality benchmarks, outperformed Google's and Stable Diffusion's published results — along with the Indian competitors we tested against.

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.

03

early 2026

Pause. Reset. Rebuild.

After closing AuraX, I took intentional time off. I studied finance to understand the business mistakes I'd made — and started building on MQL5 along the way. I focused on health — something I'd ignored for two years of building.

Sometimes, the most productive thing that you can do is to step outside and do nothing... relax and enjoy nature.
Melanie Charlene

04

Now

Shipping products, not pitch decks.

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.

That's the story so far.

If any of it is useful to you — try-on diffusion, scrappy infra, or the economics of closing a startup — I'm happy to dig in.