Indian software engineers Varun Vammadi and Esha Maindeep from IIT Kharagpur have just raised 61 million US dollars of funding for their AI startup Giga. The two engineers raised funding for their San Francisco-based AI startup during the Series A round. The funding was led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator and Nexus Venture Partners.
Choosing Giga over High-Paying Jobs?
Both individuals have been garnering a lot of praise and support, given their impressive story of hard work and determination in starting Giga. Moreover, their decision to turn down lucrative job offers from Top Finance Firms and even an offer of a top research position at Stanford has impressed the internet. Varun and Esha’s bet on starting their own AI company has been successful and looks like a classic Silicon Valley success story.
Targeted with racist attacks:
The duo, both Forbes 30 Under 30 honourees, announced the milestone in a video on X (formerly Twitter), noting that their product is already used by DoorDash and will soon expand to several Fortune 100 companies.
We have raised a $61M Series A to automate customer operations.
— Varun Vummadi (@varunvummadi) November 5, 2025
The world’s leading companies like DoorDash trust Giga to supercharge customer experience with AI. pic.twitter.com/tirHsDFsmG
Instead of acknowledging their innovation, some users mocked their appearance, accents, and Indian background. “Indians are ugly in general but you sir lol,” a user said. One commenter even remarked: “If you raise $61M maybe hire attractive people for the demo.”
“When people can’t compete in brilliance, they attack appearance. That’s not humour, that’s insecurity,” replied one user. Another said, “Watch them become millionaires while you’re stuck with a $12-an-hour job.”
“They have an attractive product — that’s what matters. You don’t use X because Elon Musk is attractive; you use it because it’s a great product,” one supporter posted.
What other offers did Varun and Esha receive?
Considering their success, their two-year-old post on the social media platform LinkedIn has been going viral online, in which Varun highlighted the difficult choice of prioritising research over handsomely paying jobs. The post read “I received a PhD offer from Stanford University and a $525K job offer from an international HFT as a quant trader. We left all those opportunities to pursue our passion towards solving challenging problems in machine learning,” he wrote.
His co-founder, Esha Manideep, made a similar leap, turning down a “$150K job as a system engineer role with a prominent Indian HFT firm.”
The post, which was shared just a day before the pair officially launched Giga in 2023, has now become an emblem of risk-taking in the tech world. Users on social media have been resharing it in admiration, calling the duo’s decision a “masterclass in long-term thinking.”
What is Giga and its mission?
Giga builds voice-based AI agents for businesses. Moreover, Giga’s mission is to help companies automate customer support through intelligent voice-based AI agents capable of handling hundreds of thousands of conversations every day. In a video posted to X to mark the fundraising announcement, Vummadi and Manideep revealed how their technology is already being used by major clients, including DoorDash.
More Young Indian Indian Software Engineers taking this route?
The story of Varun and Esha is not an isolated instance of young and talented Indian software engineers choosing unconventional career paths like AI startups. There has been an increasing number of individuals who are being drawn towards the rapidly evolving AI landscape globally. Moreover, the need for increasing innovation and research has opened new opportunities.
