Latest news with #KaranVaidya
Time of India
24-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Porsches, triple salaries & $100 million offers: AI startups go wild with hiring offers as tech giants scoop top talent
Startups are pulling out all the stops to attract AI talent, with Composio offering a Porsche for successful referrals and Cluely tripling salaries for designers. BENGALURU: When Karan Vaidya, co-founder of AI infra startup Composio, promised a Porsche to anyone who referred a product engineer who joined their San Francisco team and stayed for three months, it sounded like a spiel. "Not kidding," he wrote in the now-viral X post, complete with a photo of a black Porsche model he had in mind. You Can Also Check: Bengaluru AQI | Weather in Bengaluru | Bank Holidays in Bengaluru | Public Holidays in Bengaluru Just hours later, Roy Lee, co-founder of Cluely, another early-stage AI startup, chimed in with his own no-nonsense offer. "I'll triple your base salary," he posted, as he searched for a founding designer. "No questions asked." The timing is uncanny. This same week, Microsoft reportedly poached 24 AI researchers from Google DeepMind, including Amar Subramanya, the former engineering head of Gemini team who is now a corporate VP at Microsoft AI. Meta hired three DeepMind experts who had helped build a language model that achieved gold medal-level performance in the International Math Olympiad. Big money can hurt small AI teams, say experts Meta has also been aggressively staffing its new Superintelligence unit, reportedly offering compensation packages of over $100 million to lure top researchers from OpenAI and Anthropic. "There's a real risk that we're overpaying for momentum and mistaking it for durability," said Manav Garg, co-founder and managing partner at Together Fund. "High-visibility compensation moves can bring in mercenaries rather than missionaries. That's dangerous for early-stage companies where cultural fit and long-term belief in the vision are as critical as technical skill." For many investors, the current frenzy feels inevitable. "Talent is IP," said Avijeet Alagathi, founder of Shastra VC. "Capital solves for little in this space, so it's being used to buy and retain talent." Thiyagarajan Maruthavanan, co-founder at Upekkha, described the market as unforgiving. "In artificial intelligence , the fourth player doesn't even matter," he said. "The people who can orchestrate systems at scale are reaching infinite price." For now, in a winner-takes-all environment, founders are betting that conviction, like a Porsche, can still turn heads.
Time of India
24-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
The Porsche, the pay spike and the AI talent race that's getting absurd
Karan Vaidya (right) and fellow Composio co-founder Soham Ganatra BENGALURU: When Karan Vaidya, co-founder of AI infra startup Composio, promised a Porsche to anyone who referred a product engineer that joined their San Francisco team and stayed three months, it sounded like a stunt. But he wasn't joking. 'Not kidding,' he wrote in the now-viral X post, complete with a photo of a black Porsche model he had in mind. Just hours later, Roy Lee, co-founder of Cluely, another early-stage AI startup, chimed in with his own no-nonsense offer. 'I'll triple your base salary,' he posted, as he searched for a founding designer. 'No questions asked.' The timing is uncanny. This same week, Microsoft reportedly poached 24 AI researchers from Google DeepMind, including Amar Subramanya, the former engineering head of the Gemini team, who is now a corporate VP at Microsoft AI. A day later, Meta hired three DeepMind scientists who had helped build a language model that achieved gold medal-level performance in the International Math Olympiad. Meta has also been aggressively staffing its new Superintelligence unit, reportedly offering compensation packages of over $100 million to lure away top researchers from OpenAI and Anthropic. For founders like Vaidya and Lee, who are building AI-native products in public, the job post has become a statement. It's part recruitment, part performance art and very much a reflection of how fierce the competition for technical talent has become in AI. 'There's a real risk that we're overpaying for momentum and mistaking it for durability,' said Manav Garg, co-founder and managing partner at Together Fund. 'High-visibility compensation moves can bring in mercenaries rather than missionaries. That's dangerous for early-stage companies where cultural fit and long-term belief in the vision are as critical as technical skill.' Composio recently raised $25 million in a Series A round led by Lightspeed, with participation from Elevation Capital, Together Fund, and several prominent angels. Cluely, which positions itself as an AI-native workspace tool, raised $15 million from Andreessen Horowitz. A Porsche, in this context, is relatively modest, starting around $110,000 in the US, it's a small fraction of what top-tier AI engineers can command in total annual compensation. For many investors, the current frenzy feels inevitable. 'Talent is IP,' said Avijeet Alagathi, founder of Shastra VC. 'Capital solves for little in this space, so it's being used to buy and retain talent.' Thiyagarajan Maruthavanan, co-founder at Upekkha, described the market as unforgiving. 'In AI, the fourth player doesn't even matter,' he said. 'The people who can orchestrate systems at scale are reaching infinite price.' For now, in a winner-takes-all environment, founders are betting that conviction, like a Porsche, can still turn heads. Stay informed with the latest business news, updates on bank holidays and public holidays . AI Masterclass for Students. Upskill Young Ones Today!– Join Now
Time of India
22-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
AI startup Composio raises $25 million led by Lightspeed Venture Partners
Soham Ganatra and Karan Vaidya BENGALURU: Composio, a San Francisco-based infrastructure startup has raised $25 million in its latest round of funding as it aims to build foundational tools to make artificial intelligence (AI) agents capable of learning through experience. The integration startup, which simplifies how AI agents and large language models (LLMs) connect with external applications and services, was founded by Indian-origin entrepreneurs Soham Ganatra and Karan Vaidya. The latest $25 million Series A round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, HubSpot founder Dharmesh Shah, Marathon Management Partners founding partner Gokul Rajaram, Rubrik founder Soham Mazumdar and institutional investors including SV Angel, Blitzscaling Ventures, Operator Partners and Agent Fund. Existing backers Elevation Capital and Together Fund also participated in the round. The startup had previously raised $4 million in seed funding. Composio is building what it describes as a shared learning layer for AI agents, enabling them to accumulate and transfer practical knowledge across workflows. For instance, when an agent learns how to handle a Salesforce or GitHub edge case, that insight becomes instantly available across the network, making agents more useful over time rather than remaining static. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Up to 70% off | Shop Sale Libas Undo 'You can spend hundreds of hours building LLM tools, tweaking prompts, and refining instructions, but you hit a wall,' said Ganatra, CEO of Composio. 'These models don't get better at their jobs the way a human employee would. We're solving this at the infrastructure level.' The company began building its stack in 2022 and has since tackled challenges around multi-agent coordination, secure authentication and scalable architecture. A core component of the platform is its reinforcement learning layer which is designed to help AI develop intuition. Composio's tools have attracted over 100,000 developers and more than 200 companies, including Glean and several Y Combinator startups such as April, OpenNote, Airweave, Den and Dash. With the new funding, Composio said plans to deepen its learning infrastructure and expand integrations with AI frameworks such as Supabase MCP, LangChain, Vercel AI SDK and OpenAI Agents. 'Composio is building the missing layer that makes AI agents genuinely useful in production,' said Raviraj Jain, partner at Lightspeed. 'By enabling agents to learn from experience, they're bridging the gap between impressive demos and real-world deployment.' Stay informed with the latest business news, updates on bank holidays and public holidays . AI Masterclass for Students. Upskill Young Ones Today!– Join Now
