Building in public. Investing in founders. Writing about both.
I'm Vikas Malpani. I co-founded CommonFloor and sold it for $200M, backed Unacademy before anyone else, and now I'm building AI-native at Garvik AI. I write down everything I learn so you can move faster.
The best companies aren't built by chasing markets. They're built by people who see a problem so clearly, they can't not solve it. Everything else follows from obsession.
On building with conviction
Start with the essays that map the path: judgment, energy, and an AI-native way of working.
I advise a small number of founders each quarter. Product, scale, fundraising to exit.
Talks on reinvention, AI-native operating, and building companies that move markets.
In 2007, a sewage problem in my Bangalore apartment building led me to discover something unexpected: my school friend Sumit Jain lived next door. We spotted the real problem: India’s broken real estate market had no centralized information.
One year after graduating from VTU, Sumit and I founded CommonFloor to fix this. What started as a simple idea became India’s largest real estate marketplace — with millions of listings, 200+ cities, and eventually a $200M exit.
Read the full storyField notes from four reinventions — lessons from a $200M exit, two unicorns, and building AI-native, published as I learn.
AI floods founders with confident answers and you quietly inherit its overconfidence. The founder's calibration practice trains your judgment to match reality.
The Solo Founder AI Operating System is the six-loop model that lets a one-person company survive vendor price shocks and still ship AI that actually works.
The hardest part of entrepreneurship is not building — it is walking away from something that works to chase something that matters more.
Founders treat evals as overhead until the reliability tax comes due. How to size an AI eval budget that turns invisible failures into a bounded line item.
Founders read other people's postmortems too late. The pre-mortem practice flips it: imagine the failure first, while it is still cheap to prevent. Here is how.
Your AI model gets deprecated, repriced, and verticalized under you. How to build an AI business that survives model churn and own a moat the model cannot.
AI leaderboards are gamed, contaminated, and quietly retired. The Benchmark Contamination Playbook: how to pick the right AI model without getting fooled.
AI products launch into negative margins because founders use the SaaS playbook. The cost-first AI product launch playbook fixes unit economics before you ship.
Your AI agent is an employee with root access and no manager. The Five Gates framework shows builders how to close the agent identity gap before it leaks.
Three companies. Two unicorns. One pattern: build technology that moves markets.
Co-Founder (with Sumit Jain & Lalit Mangal)
Co-founded maxHeap with Sumit Jain and Lalit Mangal. Launched CommonFloor.com and transformed India’s real estate market. $69.6M raised across 7 rounds from Tiger Global, Accel Partners, Google Capital, and others. Merged with Quikr in a $200M deal.
Co-Founder & CEO (with Atul Jaju)
Building ReBillion.ai — enterprise AI middleware enabling companies to deploy company-wide knowledge search and AI copilot capabilities. AI assistants deployed across Banking, Manufacturing, Real Estate, and EdTech verticals.
Co-Founder & CEO (with Atul Jaju, ex-Goldman Sachs)
Pioneered live audio-video social networking in India. Backed by Google for Startups Accelerator (2020) and Orios Venture Partners.
Early-stage bets on exceptional founders building at India-scale. Two unicorns and counting.
Earliest Angel Investor
Seeded Unacademy in December 2015 with a $586K round. The company has grown into India’s most valuable ed-tech unicorn, now valued at $3.4B+.
Via CommonFloor Merger
CommonFloor’s $200M all-stock acquisition by Quikr in 2016 created India’s leading classifieds platform, now a unicorn.
I back exceptional people, not just pitch decks. Founders who are obsessed with the problem, not the fundraise.
Technology solving problems unique to India’s scale: real estate, education, enterprise AI, and emerging sectors.
Seed and pre-seed. I don’t just write checks. I roll up my sleeves: strategy, hiring, product, GTM.
Strategic advisor to high-growth startups. Operator experience, not just opinions.
What to build, what to kill, and how to find product-market fit in complex markets. Done this four times.
From zero to 200+ cities. I know what it takes to scale across India: distribution, partnerships, and growth loops.
Raised from Tiger Global. Executed a $200M exit. I help founders navigate from seed to Series B and beyond.
Building something interesting? Looking for an investor who’s been in the trenches? Or just want to say hello? I’d love to hear from you.
Occasional essays on building, investing, and the future of tech in India. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.