Kushal Murthy
Six-time founder; building Peazy Labs in San Francisco
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Kushal Seekal Lakshmana Murthy is a six-time founder and entrepreneur based in San Francisco, building Peazy Labs — an AI-powered training layer for enterprise software adoption. Born and raised in Bengaluru, he studied aerospace engineering at RV College of Engineering before leaving a guaranteed career trajectory (including a declined Boeing internship) to build companies across retail aggregation, non-profit education, EdTech, and now enterprise AI. He describes his background simply: "I come from a wealth of failure." 1
Kushal's path to entrepreneurship began in the engineering departments of Bengaluru. When choosing a major at RV College of Engineering, most of his peers defaulted to computer science or electronics. Aerospace stood out precisely because it was unconventional — newer, less standardized, still being figured out. "Aerospace was new and felt limitless," he recalled. "There weren't enough professors or labs, so we partnered with companies and learned by doing. It was chaos — and that chaos felt like an opportunity." 1
By his second year, Laplace transforms and calculus were not holding his attention. He had developed what he called a draw toward "high-entropy environments" — situations where the rules were still being written. That's when entrepreneurship became the word for what he was already doing 1.
It was during this period that Kushal met Komala Chenna, his classmate in the aerospace department at RV College. The two would go on to co-found three organizations together over the next several years.
In 2018, Kushal and Komala co-founded The Vimana — a non-profit student organization whose name derives from the Sanskrit word for "flight." The origin story is characteristically ambitious: Kushal and his co-founder made a pact that they wouldn't graduate with just a degree, but with a successful project. The original dream was a human-carrying drone 1.
They taught themselves programming, assembled a team of eight students from three universities, and got drones flying. The food-delivery drone evolved into an aspiration for medical organ delivery, and eventually the idea of transporting humans. They never reached that goal — but what they built instead was more durable: a project library for engineering students 1.
Vimana grew from five initial members to over 500 students across colleges and universities in Bangalore. Students paid just ten rupees a month — approximately ten US dollars — to borrow engineering project kits: tinkering components, free online courses, support materials, high-altitude balloon parts, water rocket kits, gesture-controlled drone components, and more. The organization onboarded the Indian Institute of Astrophysics and the Indian Institute of Science as institutional stakeholders to mentor project work and help co-author research papers 3. At its peak, Vimana's team celebrated wins at national events including the SHAASTRA competition at IIT Chennai 3.
Running parallel to his final year at college, Kushal founded Trustedville in early 2019 — his first explicitly commercial startup. The idea was to build a branded network of fast-moving consumer goods (F&G) retail stores, operating as an aggregator supporting local Bengaluru retailers against the encroachment of e-commerce platforms and large chains. He built a free billing software prototype, pitched to over fifty retailers across Bangalore, and received positive responses from roughly thirty 2.
The venture never made it past the conceptual phase. Academic constraints, an underpowered team, and an unfavorable team-market fit forced an exit before any commercial activity. Kushal later reflected on Trustedville not as a failure but as a tutorial: "From this experience, I learned how to dream to be an entrepreneur." 2
In June 2019, Kushal took a student partnership role with Airytails, a drone education platform, where he drafted the curriculum for their Pilot Training Programs — the goal being to turn a "drone noobie into a ready-to-hire professional ninja" 2. This wasn't purely academic work; it was curriculum design grounded in the same philosophy he'd been developing through Vimana: learning by doing.
That August, he became Campus Director for the Hult Prize Foundation, a global social entrepreneurship competition that runs its pitching events through universities. In that role, he built a campus community around the Hult Prize 2020 Challenge, recruiting students and organizing teams to compete in the impact-focused contest 2.
In January 2021, Kushal and Komala founded Sapientury — an EdTech startup that represented a more formal, commercially oriented version of what Vimana had done informally. The premise: over 1.5 million engineering graduates enter India's workforce each year, but fewer than 20 percent find employment in their core domain. The gap between degree and industry readiness is vast, and existing platforms addressed it poorly 3.
Sapientury offered experiential learning courses and application-based projects with DIY kits, built at the intersection of industry requirements, academic curricula, and student preferences. The first major product was an Arduino Bootcamp — a 500-minute course that attracted 150 paying beta users before the company had formally launched 3.
The startup was incubated at NSRCEL, IIM Bangalore (the National Science and Entrepreneurship Cell, India's equivalent of a top-tier startup incubator), putting Sapientury in the company of the most credentialed ventures coming out of Indian academia 4. Recognition came quickly: StartupIndia named it one of India's top 50 student startups, selected from over 17,000 colleges nationally. The company won the Pitchfest at TiE Mysuru and reached the top 27 teams globally at the TiE Global Pitchfest 2021 3. In May 2021, Sapientury was elected to join the NASCOM Foundation and CISCO Thingqbator at Bangalore's IKP Knowledge Park 3.
Kushal served as CEO. Under his leadership and Komala's operations, Sapientury grew from zero to 20,000 customers in two years, raised $200,000 in seed funding, and built a portfolio of over 350 B2B and B2B2C clients 1.
There was a pivotal early test of conviction. Boeing offered Kushal an internship — a highly credentialed, stable outcome for an aerospace graduate. He turned it down to pursue Sapientury. The decision raised eyebrows among family and friends. "When Sapientury got incubated at IIM Bangalore," he recalled, "everyone finally said, 'Okay, maybe he's onto something.'" 1
By 2023, Kushal could see the signals that content-based EdTech was losing structural viability. Customer acquisition costs were rising, and he refused to make education more expensive to compensate. Margins bled through 2023 and into 2024. He attempted to replicate Sapientury's model in the United States after moving to San Francisco — but by then it was too late. "When I saw AI's rise two years ago, I should have shifted sooner," he said in a 2024 interview. "The content-based EdTech model was dead here. Everything was moving to AI and agents." 1
He exited Sapientury in December 2024.
The months that followed were difficult — the second-guessing that trails any significant exit. "You're in your twenties — fight harder," he told himself. That conviction pulled him back into building 1.
From October through December 2025, Kushal ran a stealth startup focused on automating Salesforce implementations end-to-end: requirements gathering, solution design, configuration, testing, deployment, and post-go-live support. The goal was to help Salesforce consulting partners scale projects faster with less manual effort 2.
The idea was sharp but the real signal came from the adjacent conversation. When Kushal pitched a variant concept at Dreamforce — an AI agent that watches a user's screen and runs a live, interactive workshop inside the software — Salesforce consultancies responded immediately: "We'd pay for this now." 1
That response cleared his three-filter framework for startup commitment: user desirability (people actively wanted it), technical feasibility (the agentic AI infrastructure was mature enough to support real-time screen-aware guidance), and business viability (enterprise consulting firms had both budget and urgent pain) 1. Peazy Labs was incorporated in January 2026.
Kushal's framing of his own journey is unusually candid about the role of failure. He calls himself a "five-time founder" as a statement of experience rather than a credential — emphasizing that the wealth of learning came specifically from ventures that didn't work 1.
His core belief about why products fail in the enterprise is similarly empathetic rather than technical: "Most people do not struggle because they are incapable. They struggle because the system around them is confusing, untimely, or designed with too little empathy." 2 That belief animates Peazy Labs' entire product philosophy.
His book recommendation when asked is The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz — a signal less about what the book says and more about what he has lived: the gap between startup mythology and the actual experience of building under pressure, carrying investor expectations, and deciding when to persist and when to pivot 1.
On the difference between India and Silicon Valley: "In Silicon Valley, you're constantly bombarded with what's new today. That keeps people curious." The inability to change majors in India — being "locked onto a roller coaster you can't hop off" — was, in his view, structurally dangerous for creativity and a reason why the startup ecosystem there lagged 1.