Abhishek
Kumar

On a given day, Abhishek Kumar's platform processes 250,000 reward transactions. Not coupons. Not points that expire in a drawer. Actual rewards - gift cards, experience vouchers, merchant offers - landing in the hands of employees at Infosys, HCL, Siemens, and Nielsen. The engineering behind that scale is his. The company that built it, Xoxoday, started in 2012 in a small office in Bengaluru, with a name borrowed from the language of affection: XOXO.

Before all of that, Abhishek studied Metallurgy and Material Science at IIT Bombay - the science of how metals behave under pressure. It turns out that's decent preparation for building a startup.

Before Xoxoday: A Zomato Before Zomato

Between 2009 and 2012, Abhishek co-founded EveningFlavours, a food-discovery and e-commerce platform - a category that would later be conquered by companies with vastly more capital and name recognition. He also co-founded Prodintel Technologies before pivoting to what would become his main act. Those years weren't failures; they were calibration. By the time he and four co-founders launched Giftxoxo in July 2012, he had spent years working out where engineering and commerce intersect.

The founding team came together through common friends and family. Five people with different skills: Manoj Agarwal (product, from Yahoo and Flipkart), Sumit Khandelwal (sales), Kushal Agrawal, Abhimanyu Choudhary (revenue, from Tata Steel), and Abhishek holding the technology together. Their original idea was a marketplace for experiences - activities like cooking classes, adventure sports, and travel packages. The problem was that Indian consumers in 2012 weren't ready to book experiences online. The market was simply too early.

The Pivot That Made Everything

In 2018, the founders looked at who was actually spending money on their platform. It wasn't individuals booking weekend adventures. It was HR teams at corporations, buying experiences as employee rewards. Instead of chasing an immature consumer market, they turned the ship toward enterprise clients and rebuilt the product stack to serve them.

This is the kind of decision that looks obvious in hindsight and terrifying in the room where it happens. You're essentially admitting your original thesis was wrong - and then betting everything on the new one. The technology Abhishek built had to be rebuilt, extended, and scaled for a fundamentally different customer. Enterprise software means different security requirements, different integration patterns, different scale. The API layer alone - what eventually became the Plum platform - had to handle thousands of concurrent requests from corporate HR systems, not individual consumer logins.

Four Products, One Platform

Xoxoday is not a single product. It's a platform family that Abhishek's engineering organization has built over more than a decade. Each product addresses a different slice of the rewards and engagement problem.

The Tech Stack Behind Scale

What Abhishek has built at Xoxoday sits at the intersection of infrastructure engineering and product experience. The stack spans Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, and Argocd for orchestration; Kafka for streaming at scale; a combination of PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, and Elasticsearch for data; and React and Node.js on the application layer. This isn't a startup with a weekend side project codebase. It processes a quarter-million transactions daily across multiple product surfaces.

The platform's security posture is enterprise-grade: AWS GuardDuty, Snyk SAST, SentinelOne, and Azure Security Center are in the stack. When your clients include Infosys and Siemens, the security requirements are non-negotiable. Abhishek's engineering organization also has to support multi-currency payouts, multi-language interfaces, and reward catalog management across dozens of countries - the kind of internationalization problem that compounds with every new market.

The Investor Who Builds Alongside Others

While running engineering at a 540-person company, Abhishek has also backed 16 startups as an angel investor and sits on the boards of 6 companies. His blog post on Xoxoday's site - titled "The Only ANGEL an ENTREPRENEUR needs is another ENTREPRENEUR" - reads like a letter of gratitude to the fellow founders who helped Xoxoday survive its early years, written in a register of warmth that's unusual for a technology executive. He describes building Xoxoday with "raw courage, resourceful imagination, and a happy whistle on the lip."

That framing - entrepreneur-as-angel - is not rhetorical. It shapes how he invests. Not check-writing from a distance, but boarding tables and working problems. It's the same approach he took to building Xoxoday: close in, hands on, with the engineering getting done by people who know why it matters.

Watch: Abhishek Kumar on KYETalks

What's Next

Xoxoday is profitable, Series C funded, and targeting an IPO in late 2027 or early 2028. The roadmap calls for organic expansion over the next two to three years, selective acquisitions, and deepening integration partnerships. The company already operates globally with clients across BFSI, technology, manufacturing, healthcare, and retail.

For Abhishek, the work ahead is less about proving the concept - the 250,000 daily transactions handle that argument - and more about building the infrastructure that makes Xoxoday the default global choice when any organization wants to move value to a human being. Gift cards. Recognition. Sales incentives. Loyalty programs. The category is large and the market is still being formed. He's been building toward it since 2012.

The metallurgist who studied how metals behave under pressure is still running tests. The experiments are just a lot bigger now.