An entrepreneur has shared his journey from being dismissed by Ashneer Grover to getting into the world’s most prestigious startup accelerator, Y Combinator. Rounak Adhikary’s comeuppance was four years in the making, and it arrived in the form of a ticket to the United States.
From rejection to Y Combinator
On Tuesday, the founder and CEO of ProjectX shared a throwback video of the moment when he tried to pitch his product to Ashneer Grover, the founder of BharatPe, only to be summarily dismissed.
The interaction took place in 2022, when Adhikary was part of the audience at a public event where Ashneer Grover was speaking. When Grover called on him to speak, Adhikary said he wanted to “pitch” to the millionaire.
“You want to pitch? Tu baith jaa yar (You sit down),” Grover replied. The diss drew laughter from the audience, but it seemed to have spurred Adhikary to work harder.
The founder of ProjectX juxtaposed the 2022 interaction with snippets from his time in the US, where he has been attending several fellowships. Adhikary’s startup has been accepted into the Spring 2026 session of Y Combinator.
{{/usCountry}}The founder of ProjectX juxtaposed the 2022 interaction with snippets from his time in the US, where he has been attending several fellowships. Adhikary’s startup has been accepted into the Spring 2026 session of Y Combinator.
{{/usCountry}}“Baith gaya bhai (I sat down brother),” Adhikary wrote while sharing the video. His video has gone massively viral with 10 million views in just one day, along with hundreds of amused comments.
What is ProjectX?
ProjectX is the company behind Infinity — the world’s first cloud-based operating system.
“Infinity runs every app in its own independent computer -- own GPU, own input, own environment. Windows and Linux in the same session. Humans and agents working side by side. No concurrency ceiling. Cold start in seconds. runs on the browser of any device,” the startup’s Y Combinator page explains.
Not his first taste of success
Adhikary’s startup has been grabbing attention for some time now. At just 19, Rounak Adhikary began building what he describes as a solution to the “digital divide” — a cloud-based operating system designed to reduce dependence on expensive hardware. His startup aims to let users run high-performance computing tasks on almost any device by shifting the heavy lifting to the cloud.
According to a 2023 report by Indian Startup News, the project quickly caught the attention of both government bodies and major tech companies. The startup’s earliest backing came from the Indian government, when ProjectX.Cloud received ₹10 lakh in support from the Ministry of Commerce and Industry and the Ministry of Electronics and IT.
Around the same time, the venture also entered programmes run by global tech giants. It secured additional grants and credits worth over ₹50 lakh through the Microsoft Founder’s Programme and AWS Activate Founder’s Programme, helping Adhikary continue developing the platform while still a student at Lovely Professional University.
A major turning point came in late 2023 when Google Cloud awarded ProjectX $200,000 (roughly ₹1.7 crore at the time).
Even before the Google Cloud grant, Adhikary had already been building a strong entrepreneurial and research-oriented résumé. In 2022, he worked as a visiting researcher in Human-Computer Interaction at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. He later joined the institute again through a fellowship funded by MeitY between 2023 and 2024, focusing on entrepreneurship and innovation.
ProjectX.Cloud was also selected for the Launchpad accelerator at Indian Institute of Management Bangalore through NSRCEL, one of India’s best-known startup incubators.