Two young Indian engineers, Varun Vummadi and Esha Manideep, have become one of the most inspiring success stories in the global AI ecosystem after building Giga, a fast growing voice AI startup headquartered in San Francisco. What makes their journey remarkable is the choice they made before starting up.
Varun declined a five hundred twenty five thousand dollar quantitative trading role in the United States and a PhD offer from Stanford University. Esha turned down a one hundred fifty thousand dollar position at an elite Indian trading firm. Instead, both chose to move to California to build a voice based artificial intelligence platform capable of transforming enterprise communication.
Their foundation was built during their years at IIT Kharagpur, where they worked on advanced machine learning research and multilingual conversational systems. Recognising that voice AI would soon become mainstream, they decided to build a product that could handle real time speech processing, maintain conversational context and switch between languages instantly.
In 2023, they launched Giga with a clear vision. As CEO, Varun led strategy and enterprise partnerships, while CTO Esha built the core AI architecture that gives Giga its real time speech capabilities. This technical breakthrough quickly attracted major investors.
Within two years, Giga raised sixty one million dollars in Series A funding from leading venture firms including Redpoint Ventures, Y Combinator and Nexus Venture Partners. The platform now powers customer support systems for companies such as DoorDash and is preparing for enterprise wide deployment across several Fortune one hundred firms.
The founders also faced criticism, racial trolling and doubts about their backgrounds, but they kept building. Their work was recognised globally when they were featured in Forbes Asia thirty under thirty in 2024.
Today, Giga stands as a powerful example of what Indian origin founders can achieve with deep technical skill and the courage to choose ambition over comfort. Their journey continues to inspire a new generation of engineers and innovators.
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