The Change-Makers: Haren & Pratyush on hustle, non-negotiable traits

India’s next generation of entrepreneurs is tackling some of the toughest challenges in technology—from decoding customer feedback to building sovereign AI models.

Take Haren Chelle, co-founder of Pulse. After wearing multiple hats at Yellow.ai—managing sales, accounts, customer success, and delivery—Chelle realised that the real problem was horizontal integration. Product managers weren’t able to use the vast pool of customer feedback effectively.

Haren Chelle: Turning Feedback Into Intelligence

That gap inspired him to launch Pulse in June 2024. The agentic, AI-powered platform aggregates feedback from multiple sources, applies fine-tuned small language models, and converts it into structured insights. The result: product teams can prioritise features linked directly to business metrics. “The solution we’ve built wasn’t expected because the technology to solve it didn’t exist until recently,” says Chelle.

In under a year, Pulse has onboarded five pilot customers, with four already signing annual contracts. Armed with $1.4 million in seed funding, the startup has cut feature discovery cycles by 40% and doubled decision-making speed for its clients. Built to be model-agnostic, Pulse now aims to scale globally while keeping costs in check.

Meanwhile, in Bengaluru, Pratyush Kumar and Vivek Raghavan are chasing an even more audacious mission with Sarvam AI. Launched in 2023, the company is building India’s answer to global generative AI—a sovereign, multilingual, open-weight large language model.

Sarvam AI: Building a Sovereign Model

“Our differentiators are openness, affordability, and Indian oversight,” Kumar explains. Unlike China’s DeepSeek, Sarvam AI promises transparency, with no personal or sensitive data included. In May 2025, the company unveiled Sarvam-M, a 24-billion-parameter model fine-tuned for programming, mathematics, and 10 Indian languages.

The response has been measured, but Kumar is undeterred. Backed by $41 million in funding and the government’s ₹10,000-crore IndiaAI Mission, Sarvam AI is positioning itself as the foundation of India’s AI ecosystem. “Privacy is non-negotiable,” Kumar insists. “This is only the beginning.”

From turning fragmented feedback into actionable intelligence to building sovereign AI at scale, Chelle and Kumar embody India’s ambition to not just adopt global technology trends, but to shape them.