I cofounded Saafwater, where I ran growth and business development. We build real-time water intelligence: monitoring and automated control for public water infrastructure. When I started there was no market for it. No state had a line item for the thing we sell, so most of the job was working out how a new category gets bought. In about two years it went from nothing to roughly ₹27 Cr in orders, covering the whole state of Goa, about 1.7 million people, and carrying into Maharashtra and Jharkhand.
I worked on the product as well as the selling of it: scalable IoT systems, the water sensors themselves, and the ML models that turn their readings into predictions.
None of this was a straight line. I stepped out of formal education for a while to build Saafwater and went back afterwards, which I'd recommend to almost nobody and would do again. I studied economics at the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics in Pune, and I sometimes teach part-time at MIT-WPU.
Outside work I collect books faster than I read them. The personal library is past 2,000 now. The rest of my time goes to football and badminton, a serious matcha habit, more Substack than is good for me, and long single-player games like Ghost of Tsushima and The Witcher 3.
I'd love to talk about the affect and aesthetics of electronics, computing and AI: how machines feel to use, not just what they do. My inbox is open.
- Work Saafwater. Cofounder, growth and business development.
- Education Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics. BSc Economics.
- Teaching MIT-WPU. Part-time lecturer: tangible user interfaces, physical design and computing.
- Award IBM Call for Code 2021. Global winner, first Indian team. $200,000 prize, presented by Bill Clinton.
- Based Pune, India.