Aayush Rai and the long way from a kayak to a company

Aayush Rai remembers a conversation in a two-person kayak, outside Bengaluru, with the engineer who would become his co-founder. It was late; there was moonlight. The subject was what they wanted to do with their working lives. A boat gives that question a pleasing urgency. You are already committed to going somewhere together, and there is only so much room for a third opinion.

Rai and Varun AV had met through Siemens. Their subsequent partnership would survive an early commercial disappointment and continue through the creation of Inito in 2015. By December 2025, the company was announcing a $29 million Series B. There are several ways to tell the intervening story. The funding rounds provide convenient dates. The engineering decisions provide a more revealing account of the person making them.

Rai’s career keeps returning to the distance between an interesting invention and a usable product. He has worked on both sides of that distance: electronics and embedded hardware on one side; recruiting, manufacturing and the demands of running a company on the other. The kayak makes an excellent opening scene. It also leaves a practical question hanging over everything that follows. What happens when the conversation ends and the building begins?

Before the boat, a workbench

His training was in electronics and communications at IIT Roorkee, where he studied from 2007 to 2012. His LinkedIn profile lists leadership of the robotics team and electronics club. That combination has a certain logic: circuits teach precision; a club full of people trying to make something work adds a less predictable set of variables.

Earlier still, Rai had participated in the International Space Settlement Design Competition. His public honors list records a team win at the Kennedy Space Center in July 2004. It is an unusually expansive assignment for a school student: consider how people might live somewhere that offers very few of Earth’s everyday conveniences. Long before he had a company to operate, he had encountered a design problem with rather demanding surroundings.

He later chose Siemens for technical work he found interesting. Fireside Ventures describes his early career in terms of research, electronics and embedded hardware. Those are useful particulars. A chief executive title can flatten an earlier career into a preface, as though the real work began when the business cards changed. In Rai’s case, the engineering background remains visible in the questions he asks about the product.

The invention before the business

Varun left Siemens before Rai did, and the two stayed in touch. In January 2014, Rai left to join him. Their collaboration, Samplytics Technologies, developed an imaging invention called the flat lens. The early commercial plan was to license the technology to a biometrics company. Progress was slow. In January 2015, they redirected their effort toward Inito.

This is an instructive wrinkle in a founder biography. A finished company encourages an orderly account of its beginnings: identify a problem, invent an answer, proceed to the next milestone. Here, the engineering partnership had already produced something before it found the business that would occupy the following decade. The first intended customer and the eventual company belonged to different chapters.

The sequence suggests a practical distinction between loyalty to a collaborator and loyalty to an initial plan. Rai and Varun continued working together while changing where their effort went. That observation does not turn the change into a formula for anyone else. It does preserve a valuable piece of the history: the partnership had room to revise its purpose. A plan can become expensive simply by remaining familiar. These two engineers were willing to write another one.

The company needs more people

At Inito, technical development expanded into the work of assembling a team. Early recruits came through networks that Rai and Varun had built during their college years. The people already around them became part of the company’s ability to do more. A long acquaintance cannot build a device by itself, but it can give a new team somewhere to begin.

The connection to Roorkee continued after graduation. Rai returned for recruitment and spoke about students whose strengths fell into two groups: those comfortable with theory and those experienced in projects. He wanted the two abilities together. That is a sensible preference for someone building physical products. An elegant explanation has to survive contact with the object; an object that happens to work still deserves an explanation.

The hiring problem also helps explain why engineering and management sit together in his account of his own strengths. A company divides work among specialists, then has to make their decisions fit. The person choosing a component, the person arranging production and the person listening to a customer may each be solving a reasonable problem. The founder has to notice when those reasonable solutions disagree. There is plenty to manage before anyone opens a spreadsheet.

An education in going further

Inito joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2019 batch. Rai’s explanation of why they went was unusually direct: “We didn’t go to YC for funding.” He said the company was already funded. What he valued was learning to scale and being pushed to consider the business globally. An accelerator, in this telling, was a place to enlarge the company’s field of view.

That year also brought his inclusion in Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia. The two milestones belong to different kinds of progress. A list recognizes a person at a moment in time. An accelerator asks a team what it intends to do next. Neither completes the work of building a company, though both become prominent landmarks when the story is told later.

By 2024, Rai was discussing manufacturing partners, quality control and the journey from prototype to production on The Hardware Story podcast. Those subjects rarely have the charm of an origin anecdote. They deserve the attention. A prototype only needs to demonstrate a possibility. Production requires that possibility to keep turning up in successive objects. The second task has a habit of discovering details the first one could afford to ignore.

“We didn’t go to YC for funding.”

Aayush Rai / on learning to scale

The phone leaves the apparatus

One of Rai’s clearest public explanations concerns a deceptively ordinary customer question: when would Inito work with Android? The earlier system used a phone’s camera and an attachment clip. iPhones offered relatively predictable cameras and software. Android presented a much wider range of optics, resolutions and chipsets. Supporting another operating system meant confronting a physical variation as well as a software one.

The answer eventually took the form of a standalone wireless reader. In April 2026, Inito officially launched InSight, with built-in Wi-Fi and support for both Android and iOS. Moving the sensing work into a separate device changed the relationship between the apparatus and the phone. The phone no longer had to remain occupied as part of the reading process.

Rai’s account of development was refreshingly specific about appearances. There had been awkward wired versions, awkward wireless versions and early versions of the new sensing system. Internal users and beta users encountered iterations along the way. A finished enclosure conceals an untidy family history. His willingness to describe the ancestors makes the object easier to understand.

The original brief had been narrower: make the reader wireless, add Android support and free the phone. The team chose to reconsider the sensing system too. That decision explains why a feature request can become a substantial engineering project. Once the team opens the design, it has to decide which assumptions still deserve to stay.

A longer calendar

In November 2023, Inito announced a $6 million Series A led by Fireside Ventures. The $29 million Series B followed in December 2025, led by Bertelsmann India Investments and co-led by Fireside. The amounts mark changes in the resources available to the company. They also remind the reader how far the partnership had travelled from the first attempt to license an imaging invention.

Company biographies tend to put those announcements in large type. The calendar between them deserves some space too. A hardware team has to choose suppliers, work through manufacturing decisions and decide when a design is ready to move forward. The customer sees an object and an interface. The company has to coordinate the many separate activities that make that apparently simple encounter possible.

For Rai, the recurring work is connecting disciplines. His public hiring language asks for people who can range widely and also go deep. The combination fits a career that began in electronics and now encompasses a company. There is an understandable attraction to becoming the person who can hand off every detail. His own descriptions keep returning to the details that cross boundaries and require someone to follow them.

Back to the conversation

The personal thread is the continuity of the partnership. Varun appears in the early Siemens connection, the stalled licensing effort, the formation of Inito and the later product announcements. A founding story can make collaboration sound instantaneous. The dates show how much longer the relationship has had to last.

Rai’s profile offers a view of entrepreneurship in which the interesting technical question keeps changing shape. First, can the invention work? Then, where can it find a customer? Later, how can a team manufacture it, improve it and make it easier to use? The questions accumulate. Each new answer introduces people whose knowledge the original pair could never have supplied alone.

The conversation in the kayak was about what to build and what to do with a working life. Years later, Rai is explaining why a wireless reader needed more iterations than its original brief suggested. There is a pleasing connection between the two scenes. The first contains the freedom to imagine a company. The second contains the obligations that come with having one. Between them sits the part of the story that takes the longest: showing up with other people, reconsidering a design and building the next version.