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Sourabh Gupta

Sourabh Gupta is an Indian-born technology entrepreneur based in New York City who co-founded and leads Skit.ai, a conversational artificial intelligence company [1]. He and a college acquaintance, Akshi, started the company in 2016 immediately after graduating from college rather than accepting salaried jobs, a decision made against their parents' wishes and without either founder having prior work experience [2][3]. The two moved to Bangalore about fifteen days after graduation with no fixed business idea, spending several months debating strategy before settling on a guiding framework of working "on the edge of technology" and choosing problems only after selecting a technical frontier to master [2]. That process led them from an initial interest in artificial intelligence and blockchain toward voice technology, and specifically toward building a speech-to-text engine for Indian languages at a time when existing tools, including Google's, performed poorly for those languages [2]. Gupta has said the choice of an unproven technical frontier was deliberate, reasoning that as inexperienced 22- and 23-year-olds they could compete on a level playing field where recent research papers mattered more than prior credentials [2][3].

The company secured its first seed funding from Accel Capital within nine months of the founders' graduation, allowing them to stop borrowing from their parents, though Gupta has noted the amount was modest, covering only basic living costs for the small team in the early period [2]. From the speech-to-text foundation, Skit.ai moved into automating call center interactions for large banks and companies, and Gupta has described the original motivation as a shared frustration, on both the customer and call-center-operator sides, with the poor experience of traditional call center service [2][3]. The company subsequently narrowed its focus further to debt collection and customer engagement, building omnichannel conversational AI tools intended to help consumers understand and negotiate medical, credit card, and other debts in a non-judgmental way, including options such as payment plans and settlements [3]. Gupta has illustrated the scale of the underlying problem by citing his own experience of being billed 97,000 dollars for a same-day appendicitis surgery at a New York hospital, a bill he said was later negotiated down to about 19,000 dollars [3].

By his account, Skit.ai grew from a two-person operation to roughly 200 employees, serving more than 100 clients across India, North America, and Canada [1][3]. Gupta has described the transition from a founding team with no prior employment experience to a larger organization as one requiring the founders to learn basic operational structures, such as human-resources policies, from scratch, since neither had worked inside an established company before [2]. He has also noted that Skit.ai's founding predates the emergence of large language models and the broader generative-AI boom, situating the company's early bet on voice and deep learning within the pre-ChatGPT era of the field [2][3].

Insights & ideas

Sourabh Gupta frames Skit.ai's founding around a deliberate decision to "work on the edge of technology" rather than fixate on a single operational problem, a framework he and his co-founder developed by whiteboarding and studying US and Indian startups before settling on AI, then voice, then the gap in Indian-language speech-to-text technology [2]. He describes call centers as a widely frustrating experience for both consumers and operators, positioning this shared frustration as the real problem AI could solve, and traces the company's evolution from general voice AI in call centers into a more focused niche of debt and collections management, where consumers have unanswered questions about medical or credit card debt and collection agencies suffer reputational harm [1]. He also emphasizes that being first-time founders who had never held jobs meant learning fundamentals like company structure and HR policy from scratch while building the business [1], and that committing to years without steady income, mitigated by early seed funding, was central to their startup journey [2].

Experience

  1. Co-Founder & CEO
    Skit.aiOct 2016 to Present

Education

Media & appearances

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