At the young age of 23, Paritosh Gupta is the co-founder and CTO (Chief Technical Officer) of Orai. Orai is a mobile application that helps anyone become a better communicator by providing A.I driven automated feedback on any speech. Today the app has more than 220,000 users from across the world, and Paritosh has raised 2.3 million dollars of venture capital funding for Orai.
In 2013 Paritosh went from Indore, India to Drexel University in Philadelphia, U.S.A to study Computer Science. “Computer Science was always my passion. I think it allows you to be creative while still building something tangible that people can use” says Paritosh. In college, Paritosh did research on brain-computer interfaces to study how we can use neural linked devices to interact with computers in the future. Along with that, he was always working on side projects, one of those being Street View Mario. This project allowed you to play the classic game of Mario on actual streets on Google Maps. He credits the experience he gained from his research and his side projects for helping him transition rapidly from a student to a startup CTO when the need arose.
Paritosh, along with his co-founder Danish carved their own path towards building the startup. To fund the company initially, they pitched to college startup competitions across the US. Over a period of one year and a half years, they won 80,000$ by winning various prizes from about 15 competitions. It was this initiative (amongst other things) that also impressed Techstars, one of the most prestigious startup networks in the world, to accept them into their fold.
According to Paritosh, as an early-stage company, the most important skill to have is to be able to listen to feedback. “Everyone has good ideas, but to make a good idea into a great one, you need to share it with mentors and experts and listen to both the positive and negative feedback. For every shiny success story you see in news articles, there are 90 other startups who have failed and closed down. And too often it’s the ego of the founders which causes startups to fail.” says Paritosh.
“Working on Orai, I learn something new every day but every day also comes with new challenges to tackle. This for me is the best part about working in a startup and this is also what motivates me to wake up an hour earlier every day and sleep an hour later every night!”.
