Unhealthily obsessed with machines, machines that make machines, and the machinery that turns intent into matter, when and where needed.
The mandatory exercise in digital narcissism. Stick around if you enjoy watching someone post-rationalise their entire career trajectory.
- Based
- Leeds / London
- Building
- Antonym Industries
- Writing
- Industrial Heresy
- Previously
- Carbon Performance · Zinc · Tech Nation · Spark
- Languages
- English, Tamil, Hindi, and enough Spanish to order badly
I am a British-Indian founder suffering from a chronic inability to build simple things - someone who actively ignored every piece of sensible career advice to pursue heavy industrial infrastructure instead. I am currently building Antonym Industries, a neo-industrial company building the infrastructure for deglobalised manufacturing - a full-stack substrate between imagination and matter. Today, if you want to invent an attritable ramjet engine or a modular nuclear reactor, you have to spend a decade building the industrial organisation just to make the object exist. That is an absurd tax on invention. At Antonym, we believe future hardware builders should define the physical intent, and our infrastructure figures out how to instantiate the matter. Builders define intent. Antonym instantiates matter.
Imagine a team invents a new class of autonomous machine that does not yet exist. Or a hardware we don't have a name for yet. In this neo-industrial future we are building, the team brings its physical intent to Antonym. The infrastructure underneath figures out how to make it real. I am building cloud computing for atoms.
I arrived at this point by learning exactly how not to build things. Professionally, I have built and spectacularly failed (forward, naturally) three separate startups. I have collected every badge on the founder naivety bingo card: accelerator hopping, propping up zombie companies, companies existing on pitchdecks, building dangerously sexy products that absolutely no one wanted, paying to pitch, spray-and-pray VC pitches, and seeking the false validation of meaningless awards and accolades. Ultimately, my most effective early go-to-market strategy was simply growing a moustache and beard so the veterans in old-school manufacturing might actually believe I was an adult.
Behind the work, I have taken a decidedly unconventional, non-linear path to get here. I have often been told I talk too old for my age - an old soul, which is a good and bad thing depending on when and where. It probably explains my creeping habit of maintaining a wardrobe composed almost entirely of tweeds, herringbones, brollies, and Chelsea boots. I am a private pilot, an aviation and defence geek, a former club motorsport racer who spent every weekend at the tracks building, modifying and racing, and a former very dedicated bodybuilder that would not settle for any less than 250g protein per day, obsessed with DOMs, amino acids, glutamine, creatine, and catabolic losses (and injecting some questionable stuff as a teenager) - speedrunning every known cultural taboo, much to the collective horror of my Asian academic, doctor, and civil servant parents. I am also a connoisseur of single malts and niche fragrances, favouring anything with unapologetic notes of oud, incense, amber, leather, spices, and heavy tobacco. In short, my entire personality is an absolute nightmare for targeted advertising algorithms - a highly caffeinated, tweed-clad sensory overload that is equal parts 1950s country squire, unhinged industrialist, and recovering teenage meathead. Ultimately, I am a jack of all trades, a master of none, but arguably better than a master of one.
The long version
How I became the least favourite child, in chronological order.
Undefeated since 2004
I spent my pre-teens and teenage years setting up, running and often failing at multiple businesses, if you can call them that. Boarding school meant one weekend a month at home, so I built and automated ideas to make pocket money the rest of the time. This side-quest streak did not sit well with my parents. For the longest time I was the rebel in residence.
- 2004
Invisible ink
Developed an invisible ink. Nothing new, just age-old formulas. Sold a few canisters at $1 each to my very naive eight-year-old mates.
- 2005
Water cooler
Built a hybrid water fountain and air cooler. Sold two units for $50.
- 2005
Victor magazine
Launched and ran a school-wide English magazine, aggregating poems, essays and pieces from teachers and students alike.
- 2006
Hydro-power rig
Built a hydro-power mechanism with the help of my physics teacher. Won the budding scientist award from a national publication.
- 2006
365 Tamil poems
Authored and compiled a book of Tamil poetry. Three hundred and sixty five poems, one for every day of the year. Presented at a classical symposium.
- 2006
Maths orb
Built for the maths club at boarding school. You look inside it and watch water particles work through calculations, formulae and algorithms.
- 2007
Picking robot
Built a prototype three-axis picking robot and wrote a whitepaper. Selected for a Singapore olympiad, but two years too young to participate.
- 2007
Humanoid whitepaper
A whitepaper on a humanoid robot for the school science club. Thorough to a fault, and the source of some questionable ideas, pig skin as actual skin among them. My first science paper.
- 2008
SMS vacuum bots
Bought off-the-shelf used vacuum bots and converted them into an SMS-operated version. PCB prototyping and reverse engineering.
- 2009
Affiliate micro-site
Launched an affiliate marketing micro-site focused on health and wellness. At the height of the site traffic I made around $30 a month.
- 2010
Logo generator
Combined the affiliate micro-site with a logo generator micro-site and launched a full-on proper site. Then lost every bit of money I had saved to an online payment scam.
- 2011
Milkshakes
Started a milkshake brand with a cheap machine from China. Fifty shakes a day at peak, sold to my schoolmates. Got told off by the school and the headmaster for selling unauthorised tuck.
- 2012
Club racing
Started racing my Kawasaki, much to the dismay of my parents. Four years of race weekends, and where I learned first hand what a broken supply chain actually costs.
- 2013
Screen-printed tees
Screen-printed t-shirts, packaged inside used tennis ball and badminton cork carton tubes. Sold around seven hundred tees.
- 2013
Bodybuilding
250g of protein a day and some questionable teenage decisions. Trained under a former national bodybuilding champion with an intent to compete on stage.
- 2015
Maker shop
Used the t-shirt money to set up a 3D printing maker shop for the petrolheads in my hometown, shipping 500+ custom accessories a month and earning $450 a month, which funded my Kawasaki Ninja 300.
My racing career ended at 140 mph on a straight. I woke up in a hospital I did not recognise, with a couple of nuts and bolts in my body and a lifetime ban from motorcycles (yeah, right). To keep my parents happy I did Engineering, then a Master's in International Business. Engineering gave me a language for physical systems. Business school gave me a new obsession: supply chains.
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2018 — 2020
University of Leeds
Graduate Entrepreneur-in-Residence
The SPARK start-up incubation programme, housed inside the NEXUS Innovation Hub. Won multiple rounds of grant funding to develop a biomimicry engine that copied ant colonies, brain neuron pathways and the way roots find their way to trees, and put them to work algorithmically redesigning and optimising industrial parts.
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2018 — 2022
Carbon Performance
Co-founder and CEO
Co-founded and led an advanced manufacturing company producing metal components for electric vehicles. At its core sat an autonomous design engine at the intersection of topology parametric design optimisation and direct metal laser sintering, algorithmically designing and manufacturing suspension and brake systems. It started as a workflow where a human fed it an instruction set to generate geometries. Within two years it ran without one: real-time sensor fusion from the components themselves fed straight back into the algorithms, mutating and optimising as they went. What came out was the most optimised component for a given set of data in a given operational setting, arrived at the way nature arrives at things. As part of reindustrialising Britain, every component was made in Yorkshire.
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2019 — 2024
AI Tech UK
Advanced Manufacturing
The largest think tank for sovereign AI, supported by HM Government, Microsoft, the Turing Institute, IBM and WYCA. It delivered a venture builder programme, hackathons, workshops, and the largest AI conference in the country.
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2020 — 2021
MIT REAP
Hardware mentor
Mentored high-growth hardware companies on MIT's Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Programme, on the BUILD track. One example: took a VC-backed EV charging startup from concept to production, building out their product suite and supply chain, and landing their first innovation grant and their first VC.
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2021 — 2023
What The Tech!
Founder
Founded and led a social initiative giving Year 7 and 8 girls in underprivileged northern postcodes access to CAD and 3D printing, using tradeable CAD NFTs to pull them towards studying STEM at university, and to hand them the social capital and access to context that I never had. Raised seed capital to launch The Hoot Fund, which gave micro-grants to pupils reaching past their immediate environment, from NASA bootcamps to robotics hackathons in Zurich. Two hundred pupils across schools and colleges in Yorkshire and Greater Manchester.
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2022 — 2023
Zinc VC
Founder in Residence
Zinc backs exceptional talent to build new commercial answers to the most pressing societal problems, investing up to £250,000 across the cohort programme. I was selected for the global cohort out of more than twelve hundred applicants, in manufacturing and supply chains.
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2026 — Live
Antonym Industries
Founder
A neo-industrial company building the infrastructure for deglobalised manufacturing: a full-stack substrate between imagination and matter.