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Indian-origin techie quits $300,000 Meta job to launch AI startup: 'Wanted to work on something that...'
The techie spent around 3.5 years at Meta, most recently working on the Comet Frameworks Team.
An Indian-origin software engineer has announced that he quit his $300,000-a-year (around ₹2.89 crore) job at Meta to launch his own AI startup, saying he believes AI will fundamentally redefine the way humans interact with computers. Prakshal Jain shared the announcement in a post on X, revealing that he and Alex Morris are coming out of stealth after spending 7 months building their startup, Mitosis Labs.
"I quit my $300,000 job at Meta. Alex Morris and I are coming out of stealth to launch Mitosis Labs," Jain wrote in the X post.
According to Jain's LinkedIn profile, he spent around 3.5 years at Meta, most recently working on the Comet Frameworks Team. In his X post, he said that before leaving the tech giant, he worked as a frontend engineer building XR and web experiences. He said that his team launched Facebook and Instagram on Meta Quest in 2024, while he also contributed to Meta AI applications.
Explaining why he walked away from a lucrative role, Jain said that he increasingly found himself relying on AI tools instead of conventional apps and websites. "I caught myself living in my terminal. I stopped going to websites or using apps. I'd just ask ChatGPT or Claude Code to find things or do things for me," he wrote.
He added that the experience led him to a simple idea: “The best UX is no UI.”
(Also Read: Shreya Murthy, founder of $120M US startup, recalls immigrant parents saving for a month just to call India)
About Prakshal Jain's startup
Further, the techie argued that screens, dashboards and forms exist largely because humans do not yet fully trust machines. As AI agents become more capable, he believes that much of that cognitive load will disappear. At the same time, he stressed that privacy and user control over data would become even more important.
To test the idea, Jain said that he built a personal AI agent and trained it on his entire digital footprint. "I built a personal agent, fed it my entire digital footprint, and my iPhone screen time dropped 78% in three weeks," he claimed.
He said the experience inspired him to build technology that could free people from repetitive digital tasks, such as filing taxes and filling out forms, while ensuring AI remains secure and respects user privacy.
Jain also argued that businesses are not seeing the full return on investment from AI because many companies are treating it purely as an interface problem rather than rethinking the underlying technology. He said Mitosis Labs aims to address that by combining a reliable intelligence layer, an interface simple enough for anyone to use and a broader AI community beyond Silicon Valley.
He said that his startup has been under development for the past 7 months and has introduced 3 products - Mitosis Cortex, Yappy, and UFA & Wikipedia.
"We've been building for 7 months. I'm really excited to finally show our hard work to you in the coming days!" he wrote.
