Suraj Phanindra

As a kid, Suraj Phanindra took apart whatever electronics were lying around the house: telephones, mobile phones, anything he could get open. “I’ve just been extremely curious and always wanted to figure out how things work,” he says. The first time he wrote a program, “it felt like I’d created life.”

At AI Fund, Suraj builds the first prototype of a new idea. His job is to find the riskiest question early and answer it fast: will people want this, and will they pay for it? He explains, “That tells us quickly whether an idea can hold up under pressure and become a real company.”

As a teen, Suraj co-founded his first startup with a friend. The company used Bluetooth Low Energy beacons to build live maps of foot traffic inside shopping malls, offices, and movie theaters. It paired that with a wallet for memberships, passes, and payments, with plans to even expand into medical records. Then a patent search ahead of their next raise turned up a 2016 PayPal patent on the core idea. That ended the venture. Nonetheless, Suraj was hooked on building startups.

“I learned a lot building the company and that was when I knew I wanted to work in the startup ecosystem or be a founder myself,” he said.

Before joining AI Fund, Suraj was on the founding team of a few different startups, including a Kleiner Perkins-backed AI search startup, and served as CTO of an enterprise RAG-based startup.

Suraj doesn’t have much patience for “I can’t.” “I don’t think there’s much that someone can’t do with enough determination and access to the internet,” he says. “If you’re saying ‘I can’t do that,’ I think it’s more of a choice than a statement.”

That drive comes with a clear sense of why the work matters. “AI can be an equalizer,” he says. “It can democratize access to resources and information to people, no matter what background or what resources they come from.”

Suraj holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani.

Outside of work he’s into cars and music, and he’s recently taken up cooking, trying new recipes on weekends.