Imthiaz

Co-Founder @getraaho , Previously Co-Founder Hoppr (acquired by @hikeapp) , Bharti Airtel , United Spirits , Pizza Corner

[Imthiaz @livingondedge]

1/n Thank you 🙏🙏 @japanvyas @ipventures_in @RootsVentures for your continued faith and thank you @vijayshekhar @kunalb11 @BKartRed @arpiit @sameerpit for joining us as we bring #Bharat #online! @GetRaaho #MakeInIndia #ForABetterTomorrow

[Raaho @GetRaaho]

1/n Our #MondayMood is #FeelingAwesome with #Funding of Rs.20+Cr as an extension to Pre-series A from not just our existing investors @ipventures_in @RootsVentures but also from new investors @vijayshekhar @BlumeVentures @BKartRed @kunalb11 @sameerpit
#Raaho #ForABetterTomorrow

[Imthiaz @livingondedge]

Imagine the scenario with Virtual meetings ..
have had scenarios where the other side kept the video off ..
add to it I was pitching to 3 ppl who logged in from one machine ..video off ..I didn’t know who was on the call and who wasn’t ..when someone asked a question I was like whose voice is it ..
Least a VC could do is value the time of a founder .

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

I was once pitching in a board room at a top 3 VC firm for a $15M Series A.

12 people in the meeting. One of the GPs fully fell asleep. Out cold for 30+ minutes. Nobody acknowledged it. Everyone just kept going.

I kept presenting my Series A slides to an unconscious man in a Herman Miller chair and somehow that was considered normal. That's venture capital.

You might fly across the country to perform for people who may or may not be conscious.

It's a dance.

And sometimes you lead and sometimes you follow and sometimes your partner is unconscious.

If you're raising right now, just know: every founder has a story like this. The process is weird. The power dynamic is weird. You're not crazy for thinking it's weird.

No one talks about it because they want to continue raising. But I'm happy to stick my neck out there.

It is weird.

[Imthiaz @livingondedge]

@rajeshsawhney @arjunsawhney_ Wow …heartiest congrats 🙌

[Malay Krishna @Malay4Product]

This is an unbelievable piece of work by Sarthak and something that requires amplification.

Let me explain what he found, in simple terms.

Sarthak is a Class 12 student from the 2025-26 batch, one of the 17 lakh students whose answer sheets went through CBSE's new On-Screen Marking system.

He spent days reading through CBSE's evaluation tenders, scraped all 576 tenders CBSE has issued, and tracked how the rules changed across three versions of the same tender.

The core finding is that the company that won the contract to scan and grade 17 lakh students' answer sheets is Coempt Eduteck.

Coempt used to be called Globarena Technologies. Globarena was the company behind the 2019 Telangana intermediate exam disaster, where software failures led to 3.8 lakh students getting wrong or missing marks, and 23 students died by suicide.

A government committee found systemic failure and negligence. Six months later, Globarena rebranded to Coempt Eduteck.

So a company with that track record won a contract to handle 17 lakh CBSE students. Sarthak's investigation is about how the rules were rewritten to let that happen.

The tender was issued three times.

> First tender, February 2025. It existed, then disappeared from the public GeM portal. Sarthak scraped all 576 CBSE tenders and this one was missing from the archive entirely.

> Second tender, May 2025. Four companies applied including TCS and Coempt. All four failed the technical evaluation. Cancelled.

> Third tender, August 2025. Coempt won. Between the second and third tender, a series of rule changes happened, and every single one made it easier for Coempt to qualify.

Here is what changed, one by one.

01. The old rules disqualified any company with a history of abandoning work, failing to complete contracts, or financial weakness. The new rules deleted this clause entirely. Coempt's Telangana history stopped being a barrier.

02. The old rules disqualified any company that was "blacklisted earlier." The new rules changed this to "currently blacklisted." Because Globarena rebranded after Telangana, removing the word "earlier" effectively erased their past.

03. The rules required Rs 50 crore average turnover over three years. Coempt's exact average came to Rs 50.86 crore. They cleared the bar by less than 1%. Earlier, a smaller company had asked CBSE to lower the bar to Rs 30 crore for fairer competition. CBSE refused. So the bar was kept high enough to block small players, but sat exactly low enough for Coempt to scrape through.

04. Software maturity is measured on the CMMI scale, 1 to 5. The old rules required Level 5. The new rules dropped it to Level 3. Coempt is a Level 3 company.

05. The cooling-off period for engaging retired CBSE officials was cut from two years to one. This makes it easier to use recently retired insiders to influence the process.

06. The old rules required experience with large projects of at least 5 lakh students each. The new rules removed the student count and counted cumulative answer-book volume across small projects instead. Coempt has many small fragmented university contracts. This helped Coempt and hurt TCS.

07. The old rules required bidders to own their own data centre and disaster recovery centre on Indian soil. The new rules allowed third-party MeitY-empanelled cloud hosting. Coempt runs on AWS and Azure. This helped Coempt and hurt TCS, which owns its own data centres. It also means student data is no longer on sovereign, Indian infrastructure.

08. The old rules required the bidder to own or control the complete source code of its software. The new rules deleted this. Coempt's platform runs on Microsoft's proprietary IIS, which they don't own.

09. A last-minute corrigendum, issued right before bid submission, removed CBSE's own power to blacklist the firm if its software failed catastrophically. So even a Telangana-scale failure couldn't get Coempt banned from future government tenders.

10. The penalty structure shifted from punishing mistakes to punishing delays. The old rules fined the vendor for wrong scanning, merged pages, and unscanned books. The new rules dropped those and instead levied Rs 50,000 per day for delays. This incentivises rushed scanning over accurate scanning.

11. The old rules had a hard accuracy threshold, error rate not to exceed 0.5%. The new rules removed this number entirely.

12. The old rules specified proper book and robotics scanners. The new rules just say "sufficient scanners." The definition was vague enough that, as Sarthak notes, the scanning could be done with a phone on a stand.

13. On the security side, the contract required a VAPT (vulnerability and penetration test) certified by CERT-In before go-live, and a restricted beta phase before launch. The system clearly wasn't restricted, because the other researcher, Nisarga, was able to access it and find vulnerabilities four days before go-live. So the mandatory security audit appears to have been bypassed.

These are more than a dozen rule changes, all between the failed tender and the winning tender, all pushing in the same direction, all benefiting the one company with the worst track record in the field.

The security holes Nisarga found last week now have an explanation. The system was built by a vendor that was specifically allowed to skip the security certification, the source code ownership, the data sovereignty, and the quality thresholds the original rules demanded.

Following things need to happen immediately;

1. An immediate CAG audit of the tender process.
2. A parliamentary debate on the topic.
3. An independent investigation into
> Why the first tender vanished?
> Why the disqualification clauses were deleted?
> Why the turnover bar was held exactly where it was?
> Why the security level was dropped?
> Why the blacklisting power was removed at the last moment?

Sarthak, this is genuinely exceptional investigative work. Far better than most journalists with full resources ever manage. Take a bow. :)

[Imthiaz @livingondedge]

@helloanand @UMassAmherst Congrats Anand 👍

[Jake Gilman @jakeglmn]

What are your thoughts on this list?

Dr. Vonda Wright brings up a lot of interesting + helpful points.

If you enjoyed this thread, consider giving it a repost:

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

My 30+ observations on the greatest opportunities in AI agents right now:

And some ideas that are keeping me up at night.

1. The new buyer on the internet is an AI agent. Imagine billions of new customers showing up with money to spend but they only shop via MCP. That's what's happening. No MCP server means you're invisible to the fastest growing buyer on the internet.

2. Every franchise system in America (30,000+) needs an agent layer and none of them have one. One founder per franchise vertical. That's 30,000 businesses waiting.

3. Everyone said "distribution is the only moat" a year ago. Now I'd add that the only moat is distribution plus memory. The company that has your audience AND your agent's accumulated context is impossible to leave.

4. Consumer mobile is more interesting than it's been since 2012. Apps can finally DO things for you instead of showing you things. The next wave of $100M apps are being built right now.

5. The most interesting startup nobody has built is an agent marketplace where you rent access to someone else's trained agent. A recruiter spent 6 months training a sourcing agent on healthcare hiring. That agent is worth renting to every other healthcare recruiter on earth. The agent itself becomes the product.

6. A sorta strange phenomenon that's happening right now is agents are developing preferences. Give the same agent the same task 100 times and it starts developing patterns in how it approaches it. Nobody is studying this yet. But the agents that develop good patterns are worth more than the ones that don't. That's a new kind of asset.

7. Dead internet theory is about to become dead SaaS theory. Half the apps you use will quietly replace their support team, their onboarding team, and their content team with agents. You won't notice for months. Then you'll realize you haven't talked to a human at that company in a year.

8. The most valuable data in the world right now is sitting in the support tickets of small or mid tier SaaS companies. Every ticket is a customer telling you exactly what to build next. Mine this.

9. The most interesting pricing problem nobody has solved is how do you price a product when your costs change every time OpenAI or Anthropic updates their model pricing? Your margins can swing 40% overnight based on a decision made in San Francisco. The company that builds dynamic pricing infrastructure for agent-based businesses solves a problem every AI company has.

10. The best AI products feel like they're reading your mind. The worst ones feel like filling out a form with extra steps.

11. An interesting arbitrage I've noticed lately is hiring a human VA for $20/hour to supervise an AI agent that does $200/hour work. The human just checks the output.

12. The managed AI agent business is becoming the new agency model. $5k/month per client. You build it, run it, maintain it. The client gets a digital employee they never have to think about. This will be a $50 B+ category.

13. The first "shadow agent" scandals are about to drop. Employees running personal agents on company infrastructure without telling anyone. Using company API keys. Agents accessing internal docs. IT departments have little visibility into this right now. Lots of opportunity to build companies here. Definitely a painkiller not a vitamin type of business.

14. Right now there are probably millions of agents running on autopilot that their creators forgot about. Still burning tokens. Still sending emails. Still scraping websites. Still costing money. The "find and kill your zombie agents" tool is a product that writes itself.

15. Companies are starting to hire based on someone's agent portfolio instead of their resume. "Show me 3 agents you built that are running right now." It's REALLY early but it's starting.

16. Your Slack archive is a product. Every company's internal Slack has thousands of messages explaining how they actually do things. The company that lets you point an agent at your Slack history and auto-generate SOPs and agents from it will be enormous.

17. We're watching the cost of intelligence fall faster than the cost of distribution. Which means distribution is now the expensive thing.

18. The most underrated asset a human can have in 2026: the ability to sit in a room with another human, make eye contact, and have a real conversation. As AI handles more of the transactional stuff, the humans who can do the relational stuff become disproportionately valuable. The soft skills people used to dismiss as fluffy are becoming the hard skills. The hard skills people spent decades acquiring are becoming the soft ones.

19. There are MANY huge companies to be built around the fact that most people's agents are running on their personal laptops which they also use to browse the internet, check email, and download random files. The attack surface is enormous. One compromised Chrome extension and your agent's API keys, customer data, and workflows are exposed.

20. There's a new type of burnout forming that doesn't have a name. It's not from working too hard. It's from context switching between human work and agent work 50 times a day. Reviewing agent output, correcting it, approving it, reviewing again. The mental load of supervising agents is different from the mental load of doing the work yourself. Some founders are telling me they were less tired when they did everything manually because at least the cognitive pattern was consistent.

21. The cheapest form of market research: search "[your industry] spreadsheet template" on Google. Whatever people are tracking manually is your product.

22. Half the YC companies pivoted within 8 weeks of demo day. Not because they failed. Because agents let them test 5 ideas in the time it used to take to test one. The concept of "committing to an idea" is dissolving. Serial pivoting is becoming the default because 1) AI lets you move fast 2) the world is moving fast.

23. The loneliest job in tech right now is being the only person at your company who understands what the agents are doing. You can't explain it to your boss. You can't hand it off to a colleague. If you leave, everything breaks. You've become a single point of failure for an entire automated system. That person needs a title, a team, and a backup plan. Most companies haven't figured this out yet.

24. Your browser history is the most valuable training data you own and you're giving it away for free. Every site you visit, every product you research, every competitor you study, every pricing page you screenshot. That behavioral data, structured and fed to an agent, would make it understand your business better than any onboarding call. The company that lets you turn your browser history into agent context builds something nobody can replicate.

25. Everyone is building AI wrappers. Nobody is building AI unwrappers. The tool that takes an AI-generated document and tells you which parts a human wrote and which parts were generated.

26. Stripe just became the most important company in the agent economy and they barely had to do anything. Every agent that sells something needs Stripe. Every agent that buys something needs Stripe. They're the payment rail for the entire agentic internet by default.

27. The most undervalued API in the world right now is the US Postal Service address verification API. It's practically free. Every local business lead gen agent needs it. Every real estate agent needs it. Every direct mail agent needs it. Boring government infrastructure is quietly becoming the backbone of agent-native businesses.

28. The concept of "business hours" is for humans. Your agent closed a deal in Tokyo at 3am, processed the payment, sent the onboarding email, and updated the CRM before your alarm went off.

29. What happens when agents start recommending other agents? Your research agent finds that a competitor's sales agent is better and suggests you switch. Agent referral networks are forming organically. The first agent affiliate program is probably 6 months away.

30. Cal dotcom closed their source code. That's the canary. When open source companies start closing up, it means agents were cloning their product too easily. Every open source company is quietly asking the same question right now.

31. "AI for pet groomers" sounds like a joke and that's exactly why it will work. 150,000 of them in America. Zero tech. All scheduling by phone or IG DMs. The joke ideas always win.

32. The thing that will seem most obvious in hindsight: we spent 2025-2026 arguing about which model is best while the entire value was in the orchestration layer. The model is the CPU. Nobody buys a computer based on the CPU anymore. They buy it based on what they can do with it. Makes so much sense in hindsight. What else will be obvious in hindsight?

I'll share more notes soon.

I can't sleep with all that's going on. Maybe you too.

What an incredible time to be building.

[Imthiaz @livingondedge]

Doesn’t the Sale in yellow looks like “SASA LELE” ? Or is it just me ?;)

[Jay Yang @Jayyanginspires]

A wise mentor once told me: “Before you play the game, study the winners. If you don’t want their life, don’t play their game.”

[Gaurav Harode @edorahg]

The best way to learn AI is to build stuff.

[Ganapathi Ramanathan @Ganapathi_97]

Meet @chikuliba. We worked together at Freshworks, and he's the finest animator I've had the privilege of working with.

He's now in the market, we'd have loved to get him at Plum, but he prefers remote/Chennai gigs. He made this video for us, btw..

Chennai twt, do your thing?

[Aakrit Vaish @aakrit]

Today, I am excited to announce Activate Fellows.

A summer program for 15 of India's best student builders to work inside the country's leading AI startups.

Host startups include Sarvam, Emergent, Composio, Gnani AI, Dashverse, Neysa & more.

[Deepinder Goyal @deepigoyal]

Hello world. The first 100 Temples are ready to ship. We're now inviting athletes, scientists, founders, doctors, creators, and individuals who care deeply about their physical and cognitive health to be the founding users of Temple.

Apply for early access at https://t.co/XxGR9Hpq58

[Imthiaz @livingondedge]

@deepigoyal @RajanAnandan Super excited ..all the best Deepinder 👍👍

[𝐒𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐝𝐡𝐚 𝐒𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐦𝐚 @samidhas]

Super excited to have you on the team, @patwardhannn 🚀🚀

[Imthiaz @livingondedge]

Wow …Samsung will make more profits that most US tech companies (Amazon / Apple / Google ++ ) except Nvidia ..

[Anant Goenka @anantgoenka]

The clip that's making a lot of news from Express Adda with Ruchir Sharma

Why foreign investors are not interested in India.

[Harnidh Kaur @harnidhish]

I had my book launch today and almost 150 people showed up.

Insane. Grateful. Overwhelmed.

[Preeti Choudhry @PreetiChoudhry]

My exit poll! As I leave #Bengal, it would be a disservice not to say this: I have come to deeply admire the way women inhabit space here. There is a quiet, almost subconscious elevation of women as independent beings . something that stands in stark contrast to the entrenched misogyny that still finds resonance across much of northern India. Perhaps it stems from a cultural understanding of shakti. A form of empowerment that manifests here in ways both subtle and profound, unlike anywhere else in the country, even in the south.
Any woman journalist who has covered political rallies across India will recognize the difference immediately. Other states, a crowd is not just a logistical challenge, it carries risk. the inevitability of wandering hands, the violation masked by chaos. Here, the crowds are no less dense, the air no less heavy with sweat and alcohol—but the hands, for the most part, do not grope. Men step aside to make way. When contact happens, as it inevitably does in chaos, there is visible embarrassment rather than entitlement. What you encounter is not chivalry, but something far rarer: equality. And equality feels far more meaningful. Was never a fan of chivalry in any case :) 
There is more. Women politicians across party lines campaign with a striking freedom, aggressive, sharp, unapologetically irreverent, often using what would elsewhere be labelled as ‘masculine’ rhetoric. In most states, such behaviour would invite judgment, even censure. Here, it is met with acceptance,  applause. What feels liberating to an outsider is, in Bengal, simply normal. What we frame as empowerment  here is a cultural undercurrent.
I have covered four elections in this state, and each time I have returned with the same sense of awe. Bengal, meanwhile, ambles on with a certain bemusement, as if unaware of what sets it apart. But it is a big deal. And perhaps the most remarkable part is that Bengal does not think so.
Governments will come and go. One can only hope that this constant endures, not just how Bengal sees its women, but how, in many ways, it doesn’t. ♥️♥️♥️

[Anuj Rathi @anujrathi]

Hiring, GTM Manager #1. Retweet for good karma, beer and coffee, dear X!

[Sumit Gupta (CoinDCX) @smtgpt]

I want to address what happened to Neeraj and me last week. Of course, it was quite shocking to us as well and honestly very disheartening. But today, we want to talk about what actually happened and more importantly, what we’re going to do about it.

On March 21, we were taken into police custody in connection with a fraud complaint. Three days later, on March 24, a Thane court granted us bail, finding that prima facie, no case was made out against us. The fraud at the centre of this complaint was carried out through a fake website - "https://t.co/mn7Ou56fXE" by impersonators who have absolutely no connection to our platform, our systems, or CoinDCX. No money moved through CoinDCX. No transaction occurred on our exchange. The complainant himself confirmed in court that he did not know us and had never met us.

I'll be honest: our experience was deeply unsettling. Not because we doubted the facts -- we knew from the first moment that this had nothing to do with us. But because it made something painfully clear: the ecosystem we operate in doesn't yet have the tools to tell the difference between the people building this industry responsibly and the people exploiting it.

Think about what this precedent means: if a scammer uses your brand, your name, your face in a fake website and defrauds someone, you can be arrested. Not the scammer. You. This Could Happen to Any founder, Any Business.

That has to change.

And we've decided that CoinDCX will lead that change - not with words, but with actions. Today, we are announcing Digital Suraksha Network (D.S.N.) - a ₹100 crore commitment from CoinDCX to build the cyber safety infrastructure that India's digital finance ecosystem needs but does not yet have. This is not a crypto problem. This is a problem across any company which has a digital footprint.

Here's what we're building:
→ 24x7 WhatsApp helpline: free for everyone, not just CoinDCX users, to verify links, platforms, and offers before you transact.
→ Open Fraud Intelligence API: We have already documented 1,200+ fraudulent websites impersonating CoinDCX. That data sat inside our systems. Not anymore. We're building an open API to share this intelligence in real time and inviting every exchange, fintech, bank, and digital lender to contribute. A shared immune system for India's digital finance ecosystem.
→ Cyber Safety Infrastructure for Law Enforcement: The Digital Suraksha Network will fund training programmes for state cybercrime cells on blockchain forensics and digital asset tracing.
→ "Caution Before Transaction": a nationwide initiative to give every Indian the tools to participate in digital finance safely.

We know that no single company can solve this. Fraud networks are sophisticated, cross-border, and evolving daily. Nowadays, they make use of AI that makes them exponentially harder to catch. But someone has to start to fix this problem from the root.

We are putting ₹100 crore on the table because the ecosystem cannot afford to wait. I am asking every platform, every regulator, and every Indian who participates in digital finance to join us.

We want to ensure that anyone building startups in India like us can do so with confidence, and not with fear.