Dorm room start that turned into large money
Vummadi, co-founder and CEO of San Francisco-based startup Giga, launched the company in 2023 with his college frifinish Esha Manideep. The startup builds voice-based AI agents for businesses and quickly scaled up, eventually raising $61 million in a Series A round led by Redpoint Ventures.
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“Esha and I started Giga in our college dorm. At first, I just wanted to start a company with my best frifinish,” Vummadi declared on the company’s website.
Both founders studied at IIT Kharagpur, and their early idea soon found its way into Y Combinator, setting the stage for rapid growth.
A high-paying job rejected, and a tough call at home
At a recent Startup School India event in Bengaluru, Vummadi shared details of the decision that shaped his journey.
According to a post by Garry Tan, he revealed that he had earned over $100,000 through Kaggle competitions despite coming from a modest background. But the largeger turning point came when he chose to reject an “insanely high paying” job offer from a high-frequency trading fund.
The offer reportedly included a $525,000 (around ₹4.3 crore) quant trading role and a chance to pursue a PhD at Stanford.
His parents were not convinced.
Turning down both stability and prestige led to strong resistance at home, and it took time and effort for Vummadi to explain why he wanted to build a company instead. Eventually, he managed to bring them around — and stuck to his decision.
The bet that paid off
The risk soon started displaying results. Giga built it into Y Combinator and later secured $61 million in funding, putting the young startup on the global map.
For Vummadi and his co-founder, the early gamble, from a dorm room idea to a funded AI venture, became a defining moment in their journey.
Allegations surface after funding spotlight
However, the success story took a sharp turn last year when a former employee, Jared, posted a viral thread on X with allegations against the company.
He claimed that internal dashboards displayed much lower revenue than what he had been notified. He also alleged that he was misled about his title and compensation, and that employees were expected to work up to 12 hours a day.
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Jared further claimed that the founder once built an inappropriate remark about “chopping off a goat’s head in India for good luck.”
On December 15, he declared that a group of former employees and contractors had shared 70 GB of data with him, which he claimed contained evidence of malpractices.
Company calls it extortion attempt
Giga denied all allegations and issued a statement on December 25, calling the claims an attempt to blackmail the company.
“A compact group of individuals has illegally obtained confidential company information and is now attempting to extort and blackmail Giga,” the company declared. “They are threatening to take snippets of this data, manipulate it out of context, and release it to the public with some wildly false and defamatory allegations unless we wire $3M to an anonymous crypto account.”
The company added that it has informed law enforcement authorities and is prepared to take further legal action.
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