Who are Varun Vummadi and Esha Manideep? Indian origin innovators who rejected $525,000 job and Stanford PhD to build $61 million voice AI startup Giga
When most graduates chase high paying jobs and elite academic offers, Varun Vummadi and Esha Manideep took a very different path. The IIT Kharagpur engineers turned down extraordinary opportunities including a $525,000 quant trader job in the United States, a PhD admission at Stanford University, and a $150,000 high frequency trading job in India to build a voice AI company called Giga . Their decision looked risky at the time, but within two years Giga raised $61 million from top Silicon Valley investors and began powering customer support for global companies such as DoorDash. Their journey has come to represent one of the boldest new Indian origin success stories in the AI world.
IIT Kharagpur: where the partnership and ambition began
Varun and Esha studied computer science and artificial intelligence at IIT Kharagpur, one of India’s most competitive engineering institutions. They were part of a close research community that spent long hours working on machine learning projects, often experimenting with multilingual conversational systems before they became mainstream in the global AI industry. Their collaboration grew through academic research, coding competitions and shared interests in natural language processing.
Both graduates had exceptional career prospects. Varun was offered a $525,000 quantitative trader position in the United States and a Stanford PhD seat that is highly coveted among AI researchers. Esha secured a $150,000 offer from a leading Indian high frequency trading firm. These offers represented stability, prestige and financial security. Yet both believed that they could create more impact by building a product of their own.
Turning down the safe path to pursue an idea
Rejecting these offers was not an easy choice. It meant walking away from financial comfort and the world’s top institutions in order to chase an uncertain idea. Friends questioned the decision. Families were concerned. Recruiters were shocked. Both founders knew that the global shift toward voice based AI was beginning and believed this was the right moment to build something ambitious.
In 2023, they moved to San Francisco and established Giga with a clear vision. They wanted to create advanced voice AI agents capable of communicating naturally, switching between chat and voice instantly, and handling multiple languages at the same time. Their aim was to reinvent how large companies manage customer communication by replacing slow and outdated systems with fast and highly accurate AI driven interactions.
Building Giga and designing the technology that sets it apart
As co founder and CEO, Varun took charge of strategy, fundraising and building early relationships with enterprise clients. As co founder and CTO, Esha focused on the technical side, including AI model architecture, product design and engineering. She built the core systems that allow Giga’s agents to process speech in real time, maintain context and produce human like responses. This level of voice and chat synchronisation is rare among enterprise AI tools and quickly became Giga’s strongest differentiator.
Investors noticed the potential immediately. The company raised $61 million in Series A funding from major venture capital firms including Redpoint Ventures, Y Combinator and Nexus Venture Partners. Giga’s technology was soon adopted by clients such as DoorDash and is currently being prepared for deployment across multiple Fortune 100 companies.
Facing criticism and staying focused
Their achievements were widely recognised in 2024 when both were featured in Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia for their contributions to artificial intelligence and enterprise technology.
A new kind of Silicon Valley story
Varun Vummadi and Esha Manideep represent a new wave of Indian origin founders who combine deep technical expertise with the courage to take unconventional risks. Their journey shows that innovation often comes from those willing to step away from traditional career paths. By choosing vision over security, they created a company that is already influencing the future of enterprise AI.
Giga’s rise from a high risk idea to a $61 million funded voice AI platform has become a powerful example for young engineers and aspiring entrepreneurs. Varun and Esha’s story continues to inspire many who want to build meaningful technology that can scale globally.
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