Varun Vummadi (@varunvummadi) is the co-founder of @GigaAI, which builds AI agents for customer support for some of the biggest companies in the world, including DoorDash, one of the largest crypto exchanges in the US, and a top-three global telecom provider. At Startup School India, Varun sat down with YC's @agupta to talk about why he turned down a high-paying quant job to start a company, the multiple pivots it took to find the right problem, and how their small team of eight beat a 400-person competitor to land a contract with DoorDash. 01:33 — Early Days & Origin Story 03:37 — The YC Interview Disaster 06:28 — Pivoting Away From EdTech 07:25 — Finding the Real Idea 08:39 — Beating a Well-Funded Competitor 10:00 — Winning DoorDash With 8 People 11:09 — What GigaML Looks Like Now 12:40 — Advice for College Students 15:51 — Why Charge Early? 17:33 — The Next Big Bet 18:43 — Running the Company on AI 20:19 — How They Hire Engineers 22:04 — Product Over Sales 23:37 — Burn the Boats

The “forward deployed” concept will cause harm to many startups that go down this path. When you are building the product, park yourself at customers’ office. But, the goal should be to build a great product that does not require you to forward deploy a person for the customer to be successful. If you solve problems with people, you will default to throwing bodies at problems and will build an inferior product. Your goal should be the opposite.

Something that stunned me about @gigaai is they've moved away from the FDE playbook that's become the default for fast growing AI startups. Instead they've built AI to covert plain English from the customer into Python code to make the product work for their use cases i.e. an AI FDE. It's a huge technical feat and is how they can onboard enterprises in weeks vs months.

Giga (@gigaai) is building the next generation of customer support — real-time AI agents that can understand emotion, resolve issues instantly, and scale across the world’s largest enterprises. The team recently raised $61M to power emotionally intelligent, human-quality conversations at enterprise speed and scale. In this interview with YC's @harjtaggar, co-founders @varunvummadi and @eshamanideep share how they’re reimagining enterprise support from the ground up, what it takes to build AI for high-compliance industries, and why emotionally intelligent agents are the future of customer experience. 02:25 – What Giga Does and Who It Serves 05:10 – Building Emotionally Intelligent AI Agents 08:15 – Real-Time Responses at Enterprise Scale 11:45 – Designing for Compliance and Security 15:00 – Human-Quality Conversations at Machine Speed 18:20 – Lessons from Early Customer Deployments 22:10 – Powering the Next Generation of Support 26:45 – What It Takes to Build for the Enterprise 30:15 – The Future of Customer Experience 33:40 – Advice for Founders Building in AI

We have raised $61M, but that’s not what excites me. Our original idea was fine tuning LLMs for enterprises. Although we topped some benchmarks, the business was not viable.