SynthAILabs (formerly OpenEdu)

Founder·Remote·Dec 2023 – Feb 2025

What they do

SynthAILabs, which started as OpenEdu, was an attempt to compress how long it takes a student to become employable. Part edtech product, part community, aimed at Indian engineering students who had the ability but not the ramp.

I started it in my second year. The bet was that most of the time students lose is not to difficulty, it is to not knowing what to do next, and that a tight enough structure with people around you closes that gap faster than better material does.
On the product side I built learncode, which taught through interactive AI lessons, and eduAI, an agent that answered questions about the actual course material rather than in general. I also spent real time on Mixture-of-Experts architectures, which is where my interest in specialised models rather than one large one comes from.
The community part worked better than the product part. It reached 11,000+ students across India, and the OpenCode Developers club grew almost entirely by word of mouth: 500+ students through competitive programming in one summer break, against the usual six months, with some later placing at Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and Google.
I wanted it to stay free and non-profit, and I couldn't find a way to fund that. So I wound it down. It's the first time I learned that a thing people want and a thing that can pay for itself are different problems.

Free AI-made learning material built around project-based learning, which grew into a community of 11,000+ students across India.
Built learncode (interactive AI lessons) and eduAI (an agent that answers questions about course material), and researched Mixture-of-Experts LLM architectures.
Co-founded the OpenCode Developers (OCD) club, which took 500+ students through competitive programming in one summer break instead of the usual six months. Students later placed at Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and Google.
Wound it down because I wanted it to stay non-profit and couldn't fund it.

Artificial Intelligence · Ongoing

A whitepaper advancing MoE as a computational analogue to the brain's functional specialization.