Abhi Ahuja

Abhi Ahuja (full name: Abhivyakti Ahuja) is an Indian-Canadian entrepreneur who is the CEO and co-founder of Aiphrodite, an AI-powered advertising technology platform.¹⁵ She co-founded Aiphrodite in June 2024 alongside William Song, having begun building the product with him in their University of Toronto dorm room in 2020.² Aiphrodite is part of the Canopy Spring 2026 cohort at Founders, Inc. in San Francisco.¹

Early life and education

Ahuja grew up in India in a family of healthcare entrepreneurs; her parents built a hospital, and she spent much of her childhood around it.³² She attended Delhi Public School — R.K. Puram in New Delhi.¹ Growing up with an entrepreneurial household, she initially planned to follow a medical path, intending to attend medical school and eventually build her own hospital or health tech company.²

Ahuja enrolled at the University of Toronto to study Computer Science and Neuroscience, abandoning the medical track within weeks of arriving on campus.² She has described her background as lacking the exposure to Silicon Valley startup culture typical of founders from major tech hubs, and has framed her founding journey as unlikely by conventional measures.⁴²

University years

During her undergraduate years, Ahuja held an unusually broad range of technical and research roles. From January 2018 to April 2019, she served as Director of Campus Outreach for Women in Computer Science, Statistics and Mathematics at U of T, organizing five events to increase female participation in STEM and running workshops to reduce implicit bias against women in the field.¹

From March 2019 to August 2020, Ahuja was a Systems Engineer on aUToronto, the University of Toronto's autonomous vehicle design team.¹ She designed and deployed computer vision models for lane detection and vehicle pathfinding, created benchmark scenarios for safety testing in simulated environments, and wrote and published safety reports that received clearance from the Government of Canada and General Motors.¹ It was through aUToronto that she met William Song, who worked on the same team; the two discovered two weeks into university that they both wanted to build a company together.²

In parallel, Ahuja was a Web Developer at the Digital Finance Institute at U of T Scarborough from May to August 2019, building an IBM Watson–powered chatbot in TypeScript and Java for the institute's website.¹ She also completed a software engineering internship at 21IQ Labs from July to September 2019, where she built an object recognition system using Google Cloud Platform and Raspberry Pi.¹

From January to August 2020, Ahuja worked as a DevOps Engineer at RBC, automating system installation, outage, and maintenance processes using Shell, Ansible, and Jenkins, increasing ticket processing efficiency by a factor of ten.¹ From October 2020 to February 2021, she was a Research Assistant at Pardee Labs, developing a computational model to encode genetic structures, assisting in building a mathematical model to identify the least expensive RNA construction, and improving the efficiency of RNA blast queries by 900 percent.¹ She also served as a Teaching Assistant at U of T from September 2020 to July 2021 for Introduction to Programming, Computer Organization, and Discrete Mathematics.¹

Ahuja additionally contributed to the CSEd research group at U of T Scarborough for over four years, from October 2018 to December 2022, analyzing first-year student performance data using linear regression and running a long-running study on the role of gender in computer science participation.¹

Career

From July 2021 to January 2022, Ahuja worked as a Technology Analyst at Accenture.¹ She then joined Amazon as a Software Engineer at the company's Toronto office in January 2022, a role she held through June 2024.¹ During this period she also led tech teams at Loblaws, Canada's largest retailer.⁴⁵ She has noted that she was leading engineering teams at Amazon, Accenture, and Loblaws by the age of 22.⁴

Aiphrodite

Origin

Ahuja and Song began building what would become Aiphrodite in 2020, working from their dorm room at the University of Toronto with a small early team.² Ahuja has described the founding period as "three kids with laptops and a crazy idea that AI could predict human behavior better than any focus group."² Her motivation was rooted in her academic background in neuroscience and a long-standing interest in human decision-making: "I became obsessed with understanding what makes us human. Why we do what we do. What drives our decisions."²

The product went through significant pivots before finding its market. Ahuja has recounted that the team initially built for influencers, only to discover through customer conversations that the use case didn't resonate. The company shifted to marketing agencies after a chance conversation revealed strong demand.⁶ Ahuja has emphasized customer conversations before building as the lesson from those early failures: "We built something and then we tried to validate and found out that it does not work and no one wants it."⁶

Product and growth

Aiphrodite's platform uses AI personas — synthetic representations of target audience segments — to predict how consumers will respond to advertising creative before it goes live, covering both visual and textual dimensions of ad content.⁸⁵ The company reports over 90 percent accuracy in predictions for major brands and targets the $1.7 trillion global marketing industry.²⁸ Ahuja has framed the platform as providing brands a "crystal ball into the mind of their consumer," eliminating the need for costly A/B testing that she says consumes 20 to 30 percent of marketing budgets while often failing to explain why campaigns succeed or fail.⁶²

In March 2024, before formally incorporating the company, Aiphrodite participated in the Shoptalk 2024 "Shark Reef" startup pitch competition in Las Vegas, where it was profiled by Coresight Research among twelve early-stage AdTech companies.⁷ Ahuja formally co-founded Aiphrodite in June 2024, leaving Amazon to pursue the company full-time.¹ The same month, she spoke at the Collision Conference 2024 in Toronto on AI's impact on the marketing industry, describing A/B testing as "ripe for innovation" given its cost and opacity.⁶

Ahuja won $130,000 at the INNOVATEwest tech conference as the youngest founder in a field of 99 startups, competing before 24 of Canada's top investors.⁴ In March 2026, she announced that Aiphrodite was relocating to San Francisco, writing: "A founder from a small town out-predicting the entire focus group industry wasn't supposed to happen."²⁴ The following month, Aiphrodite was selected for the Canopy Spring 2026 cohort at Founders, Inc.¹

References

1. Abhi Ahuja — LinkedIn(accessed Apr 24, 2026)
2. From med school dreams to predicting human behavior with AI — LinkedIn post by Abhi Ahuja(accessed Apr 24, 2026)
3. Fifty shades of grey made me want to start a company — LinkedIn post by Abhi Ahuja(accessed Apr 24, 2026)
4. I was the youngest founder in a room of 99 startups — LinkedIn post by Abhi Ahuja(accessed Apr 24, 2026)
5. Abhivyakti Ahuja — Total Retail TECH(accessed Apr 24, 2026)
6. Here's How AI is Impacting the Marketing Industry — City Innovations(accessed Apr 24, 2026)
7. aiphrodite.ai Revolutionizes Ad Testing in Marketing with AI Personas — Coresight Research(accessed Apr 24, 2026)
8. aiphrodite — Human Behavior Models(accessed Apr 24, 2026)