Oct 2025 — Present
Founder's Fellow, previously Founder's Office Lead. The company that took a chance on a second-year student and became something closer to family.
I came back from the Delhi trip and walked straight into third year — the first year my college allowed internships. CropNow was the first company I approached: an agritech startup rewiring how India farms, folding AI, IoT, and robotics straight into the field. I got in as an AI/ML intern and was put on Nest, a sensor device for farms.
I'd actually met our founder and CEO, Mohammed Kabeer, back in my first year — a senior at REVA. I showed him PEDS, a perimeter electrical defense system I'd been building, and I've been a fan of his work ever since. Once I was inside CropNow, he noticed something simple: I kept staying back after college hours, every day, just to keep building.
That's what pulled me into the Founder's Office — Project & Strategic Relations — and eventually got me made Lead. I built a team around the role and became Kabeer's mentee, his left-wing man: before any project started, we'd research and ideate the solution together, and being the computer science person in the room, a lot of the early cloud, tech-stack, and backend planning ran through me before it reached the team. I traveled with him to pitches and conclaves to put our work in front of people who could move it forward.
Akash Bhumiis the one I'm proudest of from this stretch — I was Product Manager, and we shipped the application in under ten days. Alongside it came SEED, a rover for crop monitoring, and The Dot Project, an EdTech platform where Kabeer personally guides students through design thinking and building solutions that actually scale.
As time went on I moved into CropNow's core team — properly in the room when decisions were being made, not just executing them.
Somewhere in all of it, I realized how much I missed working with my hands — actually building, not just planning and executing. So I started applying to ISRO, DRDO, places like that.
I got an opening at ISRO LEOS, on-site in Peenya. My college agreed to let me attend by commuting there daily instead of classes — I'm genuinely grateful for that. And Kabeer, who looks out for the people around him like an older brother would, was fully behind it too. I resigned as Founder's Office Lead, but I didn't want to leave the place and the people who'd built me — and it turned out he didn't want that either. So he made me a Founder's Fellow instead: he's still training me to lead, still shaping how I think, and I still get to bring my own angle to whatever we're building next.
