Soham Parekh used India-Pak conflict to delay work, lied about ‘drone strike,' says ex boss

Mint

14 hours ago

Soham Parekh, an Indian tech professional accused of secretly working for several US-based startups at the same time, has been accused of emotionally manipulating his former boss by using the India-Pakistan conflict as an excuse. Arkadiy Telegin, co-founder of Leaping AI, made these claims in a recent post on X.
According to Telegin, Parekh falsely claimed that he was living close to a conflict zone in Mumbai during the tensions between India and Pakistan in May. He alleged that Parekh messaged him saying, "They shot a drone in the air near my house 10 mins away," to explain delays in work.
Telegin further claimed that Parekh lied and guilt-trip him for being slow with coding tasks, saying, "Soham used to guilt-trip me for being slow on PRs when the India-Pakistan thing was going on, all while he was in Mumbai." He jokingly added, "The next person should hire him for the Chief Intelligence Officer role." Telegin also shared screenshots of their chats to support his claims.
The messages were likely exchanged during a tense period of military action between India and Pakistan, following Operation Sindoor. The operation came in response to the terror attack in Pahalgam, Jammu and Kashmir, where 26 persons lost their lives on April 22.
Later, Parekh reached out to Telegin to apologise for the "trouble" he had caused. Sharing a screenshot of this apology, Telegin captioned it, "Soham character arc that I hoped to see."
In a separate post on X, Suhail Doshi, former CEO of Mixpanel, accused Parekh of juggling multiple jobs at once. Doshi claimed that Parekh had been working with "34 startups at the same time" and accused him of faking his CV to secure these jobs. He said that Parekh was fired within a week of being hired but allegedly continued to deceive other startups.
Warning others in the startup community, Doshi wrote, "PSA: there's a guy named Soham Parekh (in India) who works at 3-4 startups at the same time. He's been preying on YC companies and more. Beware," adding, "He hasn't stopped a year later. No more excuses."
Responding to the controversy, Parekh admitted his actions and said, "I'm not proud of what I've done. But, you know, financial circumstances, essentially. No one really likes to work 140 hours a week, right? But I had to do this out of necessity. I was in extremely dire financial circumstances." He also said that he completed the work himself, without using AI tools or help from other engineers.
Despite the backlash, Parekh has now joined a new AI startup called Darwin, based in San Francisco. He said he will no longer be taking on multiple jobs. Darwin's CEO and founder, Sanjit Juneja, defended the hiring, saying, "Soham is an incredibly talented engineer, and we believe in his abilities to help bring our products to market."