AuraX
AI Researcher & CTO·Hyderabad, India·Dec 2024 – Dec 2025
What they do
- AuraX was a fashion-tech company incubated at IIIT-Hyderabad's CIE. Fashion e-commerce needs on-model photography for every garment, in every size, on every body type, and a photoshoot per SKU does not scale. We generated that imagery with diffusion models instead.
The work
- I co-founded it and ran the research. The problem sounds like image generation and is not. A customer already knows what the shirt looks like, so the garment is a constraint rather than a suggestion, and getting it approximately right is the same as getting it wrong.
- The gap nobody was serving was non-Western clothing. Open models are trained mostly on Western casual wear, so they handle a t-shirt well and fall apart on a saree, because pleats and draping physics are not something you can approximate from a prior built on tubes of fabric. We built for that case specifically, and it turned out to be the most defensible thing we had.
- Alongside the research I built the production side: backend and GPU inference across AWS, ShaktiCloud and Modal, with latency tuned until brands would actually put it in front of customers. Modal covered the serverless side, where inference is bursty and paying for an idle GPU makes no sense, while the sustained training and R&D work sat on dedicated nodes. Research quality and shipped quality are different problems, and the second one is less fun and takes longer.
- It worked. We beat the baselines we tested against, and we signed Aditya Birla Fashion Group and several Mensa Brands labels. Real contracts, real revenue.
- In October 2025 an engineering manager on Google DeepMind's vision team in Bangalore came to me directly, referred by an engineer there, for a research engineer role on their image work, with the loop cut to a single technical deep-dive. I said no. We were mid-roadmap with brand commitments in flight, and I would rather build my own thing than take a research seat in someone else's lab. The reply kept the door open, which was worth more to me than the role.
- Then better funded companies entered the space and our runway ran out. I made the call to close it. The lesson I actually took is not about diffusion models: being right about the technology and being right about the business are separate bets, and I had been treating a win in the first as evidence about the second.
What I did
- Co-founded AuraX, a fashion-tech startup funded by IIIT-Hyderabad's CIE incubator.
- Led research on diffusion models for virtual try-on (VTO), achieving quality that outperformed Google, Stable Diffusion, and leading Indian startups in benchmark comparisons.
- Signed commercial deals with Aditya Birla Fashion Group and multiple brands under Mensa Brands.
- Built the backend and deployment infrastructure on AWS and ShaktiCloud, and tuned inference latency for production.
- Wound the company down as bigger players entered the space and our runway ran short.
Research
Conflict-Aware Adapter Composition (C-AAC)
Computer Vision · Completed
Outperforms base Flux, Imagen 4, and ChatGPT in skin quality and aesthetic appeal.
Read the full write-up →Flux-VTON+: Hybrid Flux Inpainting and Multi-LoRA Expert Fusion
Generative AI · Completed
State-of-the-art VTON pipeline synergizing Flux Fill and Redux with Multi-LoRA Fusion, achieving an 85% success rate on complex garments.
Read the full write-up →