Krishna Mehra

Seventeen Years Today @capillarytech goes public. Seventeen years since three kids fresh out of college decided to start something in the wreckage of 2008. I wasn't there for the second half.. the harder half. @AneeshBReddy steered this ship through storms I can only imagine. I'm grateful beyond words. What I remember most isn't the milestones. It's the texture of those early days. Merchants in Kolkata who humored us when we had nothing. Durga Puja 2008, camped outside police headquarters chasing traffic updates. Pan IIT at IIT Madras where our scrappy SMS service caught fire. That first angel check of ₹15 lakhs from IIT Kharagpur that we paid back in crores. We had no idea what we were doing. Just energy, naivety, and this strange refusal to think small. Then Aditya Birla and Future Group said yes. Right after Lehman fell. I still don't know why they trusted us. The apartment in CV Raman Nagar with no water during the day. Chai walks in BTM Layout with @shubhmalhotraa, Abhilash, Prakhar, @pigol1.. trying to figure out if we were building something or just fooling ourselves. Then loyalty took off. That first campaign—₹11 lakhs in incremental sales, one weekend, fully attributed. That's when we saw it. A chance meeting with @KartheeMadasamy at CCD led to the @Qualcomm QPrize. We were shocked when we won. The business grew, but we stayed scrappy. That tiny hotel in Dadar because it was cheapest. The Bangalore home-office. The Gurgaon apartment where Ajay held the fort. Holed up in Bur Dubai searching for product-market fit. The exhilaration when @sequoia (now @peakxvpartners) and @NorwestVP bet on us, alongside angels like @RajanAnandan, Venkat, KS, and Harminder. But what I really remember are the crazy things. Flooding someone in Gujarat with hundreds of thousands of texts. The new hire who nearly wiped our database on day one—later led all of engineering (take a bow, @pigol1). Anant building a POS system on an Excel sheet to close a deal. Sujatha, our first female hire, making sure our office was no longer a dorm room. Building loyalty systems where internet barely worked—the magic of "nightly sync." We were pirates, not professionals. That's what made it magic. Like humans, companies find their early years most thrilling. The teenage years? Brutal. But at seventeen, she's finally ready—scarred, wiser, infinitely stronger. We remember our failures more than our wins. We carry the scar tissue. But today, we celebrate. What a journey, Capillary family. What a journey.

The days of building a set of data pipes, dashboards and some workflows and building a business around it are long gone, not just in India but anywhere in the world. I don’t think we should call this out as a disadvantage for Indian founders only. You cant build a company for it even in Dogpatch

@kpowerinfinity @PaloAltoNtwks @PortkeyAI Portkey is great. Portkey is original. Portkey is core. That would fall under point 2 I mentioned. I know the post is long, but please read till the end :)

This is so dumb. @PaloAltoNtwks just announced intent to acquire @PortkeyAI: built entirely in India. Portkey had the most marquee global customers you could ask for.

@vijayshekhar @pitdesi @pitdesi is the culture carrier for the desi population in the Bay Area! (Maybe all of the US)

Ha ha ! @pitdesi just tweeted same. 😅

Palo Alto Networks agrees to acquire Portkey, which develops AI gateway tech to manage and secure AI agents; sources say the deal values Portkey at $120M-$140M (The Economic Times) (Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!)

@aakashgupta You can do this pretty easily with a $100 hatch device.

Mark Zuckerberg engineered a custom hardware device for his wife in 2019. No clock face. One faint light. A one-hour window. Priscilla had a specific problem. She'd wake up in the middle of the night, check her phone for the time, and the number itself spiked her anxiety. 4am meant worry about the kids waking soon. 5:30 meant calculating whether to just get up. The information was the trigger. Most engineers approach "can't sleep" by adding things to the bedroom. A meditation app. A Hatch alarm. A weighted blanket. A sleep coach. Mark removed the variable that was running the wake-up loop. The Sleep Box sits on Priscilla's nightstand and shows nothing for 23 hours a day. Between 6am and 7am it emits a single faint light. Faint enough not to wake her if she's still asleep. Visible enough that if she's already up, she knows it's okay to start the day. The rest of the night, dark. No clock. No time display. If she wakes at 3am she has no data to push her cortisol up with, so she goes back to sleep. He wrote the firmware and built the enclosure himself. No team, no procurement, no Meta resources. He posted the result on Instagram and said it worked better than he expected. The design move most CEOs would never run is the personal one. The instinct is to outsource a family problem to a specialist. A sleep coach. A doctor. A consumer electronics startup with a Series B and a marketing budget. Mark intervened at a specific link in the chain. Time data hitting Priscilla's brain at 3am was what broke sleep. The phone got moved off the nightstand and replaced with a box that physically cannot deliver that data. The box has no clock. That's the entire product.

Three years ago, two technical founders in India started building AI infrastructure for a market that didn't exist yet. Today, @PaloAltoNtwks announced their intent to acquire @PortkeyAI. Huge congratulations to @jumbld, @ayushgarg_xyz and the entire Portkey team! It started with a problem they'd seen up close together at PepperContent. Conviction on where AI infrastructure was heading before most enterprises had shipped a Gen AI feature to production. A stellar team, a deeply opinionated product, a category they helped define from scratch. All built across a 12-hour time difference. When we first met them, what stood out wasn't the pitch. It was how clearly they could see around corners. They predicted the shift from "do I even need a gateway?" to "I need federated gateways in three regions" before most CTOs knew they had the problem. By the time we led their Series A a few months ago, Portkey was already governing $180M+ in annualized AI spend, processing 500B+ tokens a day for the likes of DoorDash, Roche, Postman, and Snorkel AI. They had a crisp view of becoming the default control plane for enterprise AI. Palo Alto Networks saw the same inevitability. This outcome validates that entire thesis. For a long time, the narrative around Indian startups was limiting. Great operators, but not category creators. Execution, not invention. There have been acquisitions before, but many were acqui-hires that quietly got tucked into a portfolio. Rohit and Ayush didn't get the memo. They built cutting-edge infrastructure that the world's biggest security company wrote a serious check to own. That narrative is now outdated. The next founder watching this thinks: "I can build from here, for the world, and win." That's the virtuous loop. For everyone in the corridor doing the 24-hour flights, the 6am customer calls, the cold LinkedIn outreach that goes nowhere, the late nights debugging on call while your kids sleep one timezone over: today is a good day. It's harder, but sometimes it's worth it :) This is just the beginning. Rohit and Ayush: you have just inspired a whole generation of founders. @PoorviVijay @mukularora Dhruv Jain Prerna Gupta Sanskar Jain @ElevCap

When we first invested in Snabbit, it was live only in Powai. Every time I described it to friends elsewhere, their immediate question was always: “When is this coming here?” In hindsight, the insight feels obvious. But it took an India-first, customer-backwards lens to see it… and exceptional execution to bring it to life. What’s stood out since is the speed of adoption amongst consumers and experts. Snabbit is on track to become a household name, bringing convenience to consumers across multiple services and more importantly unlocking better livelihood for experts. Really fortunate to have had a ringside view to witness @Aa_Agarwl and team @just_snabbit creating a new category! 🙌🙌 @ElevCap @manishadvani12

@CoreAutoAI Congrats on the launch @_arohan_

Today we're announcing Core Automation Our objective: systems that optimize and automate work, starting with research itself.

@deedydas +1 just got back from there. Insane!

The highest concentration of Michelin-starred restaurants in the world is 20x denser than Paris, 50x Manhattan/SF and 100x Tokyo. It’s Higashiyama ward in Kyoto. With ~50 stars for ~35k residents, it has an insane 1 star every ~700 residents! You can’t be >200m away from one.

Indian IT Services industry may have just gotten a lifeline thanks to Claude Mythonos…

So excited to see Mosaic finally out of stealth. The future of agentic video editing is finally here!

Growing 10X was so 2025. Growing 3X is the new hotness in 2026, except it has to come in one quarter!

Very excited to share our partnership with @noondesign. Design is what differentiates truly great products from the also-ran. But the people who design them — they have been stuck either with stodgy tools, or grappling with SWE-centric tools like Claude Code which were not built for their workflow. Noon changes that: built natively for the design workflow to help speed creativity and not get caught up in slop. From the first time we met @bandiaditya and @kushagrasinha7 we were struck by both the audacity of vision as well as their ability to translate that vision into reality: one that designers we showed to had a jaw-dropping moment. A design canvas that’s fluid enough to unleash creativity but produces impeccable code that your engineering partner is going to be thankful for. It’s been incredible to see them build with painstaking detail over the last year. This is what good design looks like - sweating the details. And this is the ethos designers appreciate. The Noon team’s been cooking - reach out if you want to be an early access customer. It’s not been straightforward since this is a complex technical challenge, and the Noon team has created one of the most talent dense environment to help craft this product. Reach out if you are interested in building the future of product design. @PoorviVijay @mukularora @ElevCap

@pitdesi Isn’t it cheaper to buy business?

United is going to let you buy 3 seats and covert it to a bed. Such a no-brainer product for airlines to add on long-hauls, particularly great for families.

@PortkeyAI @jumbld Incredible momentum!

Last week @jumbld shared that Portkey had crossed 1T tokens/day on our AI Gateway. Today, 10 days later, we just crossed 2T tokens processed / day

today, we are making the @mosaic_so video editing api available to all agents & humans. see how we setup larry — our slack openclaw agent — with a mosaic api key and had it clip, edit, and post archived steve jobs footage. all without ever leaving slack. you can connect your openclaw agents, claude code, or vibe-coded saas to our agentic video editing api. no waitlist — now live at mosaic [dot] so. comment "API" to get 100 free credits dropped into your account to get started with the api for free. more details on why & how we’re making this change below (thread):

TIL: Stunts and Virality on X don't build a successful business all by themselves, sometimes you need a working product too 🤠

Where is @github CoPilot at these days? Asking for a friend.