Indian-origin techies Varun Vummadi and Esha Manideep announced this week that their San Francisco-based AI startup Giga had raised funds worth $61 million.
“We have raised a $61M Series A to automate customer operations,” they shared via X on Wednesday. “The world’s leading companies like DoorDash trust Giga to supercharge customer experience with AI.”
The Giga duo also stole the spotlight on social media this week over their witty back-and-forth. Esha took to his personal account to confess that raising $61 million was not what “excites” him, as their “original idea was fine tuning LLMs for enterprises. Although we topped some benchmarks, the business was not viable.” Varun hilariously responded to his tweet, quipping, “I am excited about the $61 million.”
As per their recent activity on X, David Zhu, the builder and co-founder of Reevo, stepped up to take on the role of Giga’s investor in addition to leading his own AI startup. Merely days ago, the Giga team also announced its brand-new partnership with DoorDash.
While they took pride in boasting how their “AI agents” were handling hundreds of thousands of conversations per day, SNS users decided to swing the other way and subject them to unprovoked trolling.
if you raise $61M maybe hire attractive people for the demo https://t.co/MUeNT5og94 pic.twitter.com/lekL9RiU7x
— bone (@boneGPT) November 5, 2025
Who are Varun Vummadi and Esha Manideep?
Vummadi is credited as the co-founder and CEO of the artificial intelligence startup Giga, with Manideep as the company’s other co-founder and CTO.
Another mutual connection between the techie duo is that they graduated from the 2019-2023 batch of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur. At the time, Varun pursued BTech, Electrical Engineering, and Esha got his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. The two best friends sowed the seeds of the AI company’s inception in their college dorm.
On top of that, Varun and Esha were even named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list (2024). Founded in 2023, the-then ‘Giga ML,’ a seed funding round helped them raise $3.6 million. Nexus Venture Partners led the path, with Y Combinator, Liquid 2 Venture, 8vdx and other key angels like Y Combinator President Garry Tan joining in the funding round.
A two-year-old LinkedIn post further lifted the lid on Varun Vummadi’s past and the kind of sacrifices he and his buddy made to kickstart the Giga journey. At the time he wrote, “We are launching our product tomorrow, Esha Manideep, IIT KGP CS’23 (Institute rank: 3), and I am excited to launch our startup Giga.”
They intended to push their initiative onto the global stage “to simplify using Large Language Models (LLMs) for finetuning and inference.” Varun even laid out some heavy confessions, revealing that he and Esha were offered what could’ve been life-changing opportunities (as many Indians would traditionally view them as) after their graduation.
“Esha was offered a $150K job as a system engineer role with a prominent Indian HFT firm,” the present-day Giga CEO wrote. “I received a PhD offer from Stanford University and a $525K job offer from an international HFT as a quant trader.” Nonetheless, they left them l behind to pursue their passion, which was “solving challenging problems in Machine learning.”
He firmly established that their ambitious collaboration had dealt out fine-tuned models, which are “3X faster than GPT4 API,” 70% cheaper and better-performing “on a specific use case than GPT4.” Vummadi also asserted, “We outperform GPT4 + Prompting techniques after fine-tuning.”
Both of them recently sat down for an interview with Y Combinator, with the startup accelerator describing Giga as being responsible for “building the next generation of customer support — real-time AI agents that can understand emotion, resolve issues instantly, and scale across the world’s largest enterprises.”
Netizens troll Indian-origin co-founders
However, instead of focussing on their big leap as co-founding partners of Giga, the Internet concerned itself with the most superfluous things. As some trolled Varun and Esha for their accent, others dragged them for their appearances.
One particular tweet, which read “if you raise $61M maybe hire attractive people for the demo,” especially gained traction on the SNS platform. It had amassed nearly 3 million views at the time of writing.
In a follow-up response, the person behind the hate comment suggested that Varun had blocked him on X. However, that didn’t stop the user from hurling more troubling comments about the Giga co-founder and CEO’s appearance, as they went on to compare his old snaps with his present-day looks.
Another user unloaded vicious comments like, “These 2 kids are ugly, not well spoken English,” while also adding a shortened version of a derogatory slur directed at Indian people.
But that’s not to say that people didn’t come to their rescue. Defending the Giga bosses, another Indian-origin techie countered, “Racism is normal nowadays in this platform. The good thing is, they got the bag of $61M. But the guys who are doing racism in the comments and quoting it are still behind that $61 from Elon. The difference is huge. Clowns.”
Yet another person joined in, penning a lengthy response to the haters. The user commended how Varun and Esha never faltered in their path despite experiencing great pains along the way. The X user lauded them for never getting knocked down in spite of what must have initially seemed like an endless series of rejections, with no one believing in their vision.
Here are some of the praises they heaped on the duo: “Spent their own savings to build the product, lived on the cheapest food for months, and endured tough living conditions… Lived through months (or years) of pre-PMF anxiety… Exhausted as hell, but still had to motivate the team every single day…Worked 12+ hours daily for years – often skipping meals, surviving on irregular eating habits.”
Congratulating them on their landmark achievement, the netizen again hit out against the haters, saying, “If your takeaway is ‘they raised $61M but couldn’t find someone better looking for the video,’ it means their journey’s been a lot rougher than the polished ones you’re used to seeing.”
Read through some comments and retweets – not sure why people are saying bad things about them. Behind the scenes, here’s what it actually took to get here:
— dylan ai/acc (@ThinksDylan) November 6, 2025
1. Got ghosted by countless VCs and looked down on by many. 90% didn’t believe in them, and another 9% pretended to – but… https://t.co/xUqcSlMwYq
