It didn’t start as a question. It started as a childhood dream I couldn’t shake.
I’d imagine things that didn’t exist yet, and then, years later, watch someone else build them. In the 6th grade I sketched removable heels — shoes whose heel you could swap — and never took it seriously. One day there it was, real, made by someone who did. That was the moment I stopped treating my own fiction as fiction. Filling the gap between what I imagine and what exists became the whole point.
8th grade — the dream, not the question
A chemistry lab, a few of us, something we cobbled together out of chemicals and circuits that felt, for a moment, alive. It read less like engineering and more like the start of a relationship, and that feeling never left. I wasn’t asking whether a machine could think; I was imagining something that would grow up alongside me.
CSE, then an M.Tech in IoT and sensor systems
Years spent on how machines perceive, and how context and consent move between devices. The formal version of the 8th-grade question — the same idea, now with math and hardware under it.
Two startups before this one
Innate came first, out of a 40-hour chemical hackathon we won — the grown-up echo of that chemistry lab. It was genuinely interesting, and that turned out to be the trap: interesting is not the same as urgently needed, and the friction of logging in and staying reliable quietly killed adoption. Lesson one — build something people need, not something clever.
Then SMB: software to make small businesses run easier. A real problem, but not my problem, and I was solving it from the outside. Building it showed me the actual wall — not intelligence, but context. The systems only worked when people handed over specific, personal, sensitive information, and there was nowhere for that information to live that the person controlled. That is the wall this company exists to remove.
SoulBots, now
So build that layer first: an identity people own. Lethe is the first slice of it, and it works today. The companion that has been the point since the 8th grade is the direction it is pointed at — not a claim about what ships now.
I don’t know exactly what it becomes. I know the shape of the itch: a version of you that is yours, that any tool can read with your permission, that you never have to re-teach from scratch — and, someday, that does not need a screen at all. That is the through-line from the chemistry lab to here.