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‘Middle class’ Mumbai 20-year-old who gave up IIT dream to study in US raises $2.6 million for AI startup
Dhravya Shah, a 20-year-old “middle-class” man from Mumbai, has raised $2.6 million in seed funding for his artificial intelligence startup, Supermemory.
Dhravya Shah, a 20-year-old “middle-class” man from Mumbai, has raised $2.6 million (around ₹23 crore) in seed funding for his artificial intelligence startup, Supermemory, which aims to enhance the long-term memory of AI models.
Supermemory’s investors include Google AI chief Jeff Dean, DeepMind product manager Logan Kilpatrick, and executives from OpenAI, Meta, and Google, among others, according to a TechCrunch report.
Who is Dhravya Shah?
Dhravya Shah is a 19-year-old entrepreneur from Mumbai, India, and the founder of Supermemory, an AI startup.
He began building consumer-focused bots and apps as a teenager and gained early success after selling one of his bots — which turned tweets into attractive screenshots — to the social media tool Hypefury.
Originally preparing for the IIT entrance exams, Shah used the money from that sale to move to the US and study at Arizona State University, before dropping out to focus on Supermemory.
In a YouTube video shared last year, Shah had revealed how he convinced his parents to buy him a laptop during the pandemic – “Being in a middle class family in Mumbai my parents were hesitant at first, but they eventually got me a laptop,” he said.
Shah taught himself how to code using that laptop, built a bot that he sold to Hypefury, and used the money to move to the United States to study at the Arizona State University (ASU).
He eventually dropped out of ASU and moved to San Francisco to focus on Supermemory.
According to his X profile, he is currently in the US on an O-1 visa.
What does Supermemory do?
After relocating to the US from Mumbai, Shah challenged himself to build something new every week for 40 weeks. During one of those weeks, he created an early version of Supermemory – then called Any Context – and shared it on GitHub. At the time, it was a simple tool that allowed users to chat with their Twitter bookmarks.
Over time, Supermemory evolved into a much more powerful system. It now extracts “memories” or insights from unstructured data – like documents, chats, projects, and emails – and helps applications understand the context behind that information.
In simple terms, it gives AI the ability to remember what it has learned before and use that knowledge later.
“Our core strength is to extract insights from any kind of unstructured data and give the apps more context about users. As we work across multimodal data, our solution is suitable for all kinds of AI apps ranging from email clients to video editors,” Shah said.
More about Supermemory
According to TechCrunch, Shah’s startup has secured seed funding of $2.6 million led by Susa Ventures, Browder Capital, and SF1.vc. The round also includes individual investors like Cloudflare’s Knecht, Google AI chief Jeff Dean, DeepMind product manager Logan Kilpatrick, and Sentry founder David Cramer, among others.
Supermemory also has an impressive list of existing customers, including Cluely, AI video editor Montra, real estate startup Rets and more.
