summer 2026 we packed bags and booked a one-way flight to bangalore. no return ticket, barely any money, and a google form we had filled weeks earlier for Uniform2Unicorn at polaris school of technology. we typed something decent, hit submit, and forgot about it until they called and said we won. so me, tanish, and aditya left, three people hoping the rest would make sense after landing.
we reached at night and a car was already waiting, which made us feel briefly more important than we were. polaris gave us four days on campus so we could pitch, sit through interviews, meet people, shoot some reels, and try to look like we had a plan. some of that was real belief in what we were building. some of it was just adrenaline and not wanting to waste the room.
around the same week Masters Union asked us to a pitching event. it was supposed to be the 13th, then they moved it to the 17th so we could make it, and we definitely told each other that more than once because it felt good. after polaris the trip changed. no campus, no free rooms, just us, three hotels across the next few weeks, and the city.
hackathons started around june 19th. we did three of them back to back: AIBOOMI, Reactor.inc, and the Agent Arena Bangalore Hackathon 2026, an AMD × AICamp × Google collab with a ₹50,000 first prize. we won aiboomi and agent arena, both of them sitting on something i threw together mid-hackathon called Prometheus, a framework we kept stacking newer stuff on, like the world's most sleep-deprived lego set. if you want the repo: github.com/AdityaBhatia-agentperry007/promethues. the spelling is wrong and we still have not fixed it.
somewhere around june 23rd or 24th we started going to networking nights hosted by cedat, and that is where the month actually opened up.
we met Pratham Pengoria there, the founder of jee simplified and solve arena. aditya had been watching him since 9th grade, so sitting across a table at Tim Hortons in HSR Layout felt slightly fake, like a youtube tab had grown a coffee cup and started asking what we were building. we stayed two or three hours talking about education, about what jee and neet students still cannot get from the tools that exist, and about where indian edtech is actually going versus where people like to say it is going. by the end there was an unofficial deal on the table: build a specific piece of software and he would pay ₹2 lakhs to use it on his platform.
the line that mattered more came near the end, almost thrown away: there is this guy named ravneet singh. director of technology at vedantu, co-founder. physics wallah offered him cto and he turned it down. now he has started prolearn and raised ₹30 crore in pre-seed, just on an idea, and his office is around the corner. then pratham left, we sat there for maybe thirty seconds, and aditya opened google maps.
four minutes later we were upstairs telling the security guard we were there to meet ravneet singh. three teenagers, no appointment, no context, nothing except vibes. the guard was trying to decide what we were, which was fair, and then ravneet walked past the corridor at that exact moment. he stopped, looked at us, and you could see him picking between “who are these people” and “fine, i am curious.” the second one won. he said come in.
we sat for an hour and talked about who we were, why we had come to bangalore, and what we were hoping to get out of it. we talked about orca, the agentic android control thing we were pitching at the time, and we asked about internships and lors for college. ravneet does not soften things. he told us what was weak, talked about edtech like someone who had actually shipped it at scale, and that hour was more useful than most of the polite rooms we had sat in that month.
the software we had been loosely shaping with pratham was Vivacity, still rough. ravneet is the person who made us take it seriously. the idea then was simple in a way that still makes sense to me: grant sanderson / 3blue1brown built manim so math could move on a screen, and we wanted that visual language pointed at the actual jee and neet questions students get stuck on, the ones where they already know the theory and still cannot see the next step. phet and simphy explain concepts in general. we wanted something that takes a specific doubt and walks the solution the way your head wants to see it. we took the design feel of 3b1b, trained a small open-source model on a jee-relevant set, and built an engine that generates those animations. the public manim forks we tried were either for different jobs or basically unusable, so we had to make the pipeline ourselves. those were the demos we eventually took back to ravneet.
after the first meeting we tried visiting a few more times. he was unavailable most of those, which is the polite way of saying we kept showing up unannounced like that was a normal thing to do. around july 3rd or 4th he was actually there and agreed to see us again. we showed him what we had built, sat another two or three hours, met a lot of the people working there, and came out with a ₹60k internship. we have not accepted it yet, but it is there.
there were other people too. Prateek Behera, co-founder of gradcapital, sat with us one-on-one, talked through vivacity, and we are still pending approval on a ₹6 lakhs deal. Abhishek Sensharma from lucidml we got to know through gradcapital. we spent nights at Forge Residency and InnovationNoveltyHQ because we knew people there, and those rooms with whiteboards and bad wi-fi were some of the best hours of the trip.
and then there were two days where we were completely broke, camped outside a Shell petrol pump with laptops, waiting for a transfer, even though we had just won ₹50,000 at a hackathon and people were talking six-figure deals with us over coffee. the city did not need to know. we moved into the third hotel when the money finally showed up.
by the time we booked the return tickets we had won two hackathons, built something that people in indian edtech actually sat with, walked into an office with no appointment and came out with an internship, left a ₹6 lakhs conversation pending, and spent two days outside a petrol pump. we came with almost nothing and left with more than we had any right to plan for. the competition got us on the plane. the rest of the month was showing up anyway.
ps: if you made it this far, someone from your city might already be on the list. creepy? a little. fun? also a little.