The trouble with Anand Janefalkar's name was not the name. It was everything the machinery around it failed to remember. A support agent would hear “Janefalkar,” attempt the spelling, insert a letter where no letter belonged, and send an email into the void. The ritual was modestly comic until it happened again. And again. Soon it began to look less like human error and more like a design diagnosis.
By 2015, the device in a customer's hand could recognize a fingerprint, know a location, carry photographs and preserve an entire thread of conversation. Yet the moment that customer asked a company for help, this clever little rectangle was demoted to a telephone. Identity disappeared. Context evaporated. Two people equipped with cameras, screens and abundant bandwidth were invited to describe the problem aloud, preferably after navigating a phone tree.
Janefalkar had spent his career close enough to the smartphone revolution to find this ridiculous in a useful way. His response was UJET, a San Francisco software company founded on July 10, 2015. Its proposition was not that customer service needed another channel. It was that the conversation should be allowed to keep its senses.
identity + media
routing + context
one useful view
First came the signal
The route to that idea began in Aurangabad, India, where Janefalkar was born, and continued in Mumbai, where his family moved and where he studied engineering. His father was a chemical engineer. In the India of Janefalkar's youth, he has recalled, engineering and medicine carried the gravitational pull of stable, legible careers. But his own curiosity acquired a more cinematic origin: he saw a car phone in a movie and wanted to understand how cordless communication could work reliably.
He completed his electronics engineering degree around 2002, then flew to Dallas for a master's in telecommunications at Southern Methodist University. He arrived on August 6, a date he could still summon years later. Research experience with Nokia Research Center sharpened the interest. When he graduated in late 2004, Motorola offered him a role in Libertyville, Illinois, then the home of its mobile operation.
The next seven years were an education in the parts of technology that launch-day photographs edit out. Janefalkar worked across seven smartphones, a tablet and a wearable. Some early products shipped in Japan, where he encountered a touchscreen 3G phone before either feature felt ordinary in the United States. He later worked on Motorola's first Android phones for T-Mobile, the Cliq and Cliq XT, and on the Xoom tablet.
His favorite was the Atrix, a dual-core phone with a fingerprint sensor on its back. The product did not achieve the commercial success he thought it deserved, but it contained several ideas that would become commonplace. Motorola taught him how advanced hardware survives networks, certification, security requirements and scale. It also taught him the melancholy fact that technical accomplishment does not compel a market to care.
“I definitely credit Motorola for a lot of my technical and process maturity.”Anand Janefalkar, reflecting on 2004-2011
Four buttons, fewer excuses
In 2011, he left Illinois for the Bay Area. The local customs required adjustment. At one interview, someone offered him a beer afterward. He suspected a trick. At Motorola, he remembered, serving alcohol on the premises involved a license. Silicon Valley's casualness could apparently extend to beverages as well as job titles.
After shorter stops in consumer technology, including HP Palm, he landed at Jawbone. There he found a complementary education. Motorola had shown him the formidable work behind a device; Jawbone's speakers showed him what happened when that work did not burden the customer. He admired the Jambox because the object looked inviting and its controls were sparse. Engineers could always add one more feature or button. Restraint was the more social skill.
By April 2013, Janefalkar felt ready to start something. He did not yet know investors or many founders. He advised portfolio companies and worked around hardware, including a vice president role at wearable-computing company Thalmic Labs. Then he asked a better question than “What can I build?” He asked which recurring problem bothered him most. The answer was customer support, complete with the mutilated surname and missing emails.
The outsider status helped. Janefalkar had never set foot in a contact center. He had no affection for its inherited architecture, which traced back to physical servers, dedicated lines and private branch exchanges. A smartphone call still arrived as though it came from a beige desk phone. To him, the absurdity was architectural: a banking app might trust a fingerprint for moving money, then send the authenticated customer out to a dialer where an agent asked who they were.
The checking-account prototype
Janefalkar began with authentication. Working with a few contractors and paying from his checking account, he built a small demonstration: if a customer initiated support inside an authenticated app, the support interaction ought to reuse that trust. An agent could request verification with the same device mechanisms the company had already approved. It was a narrow proof for a broad complaint.
He showed the prototype to industry experts, investors and prospective customers. The last group mattered particularly. A demonstration can charm a financier while leaving a buyer politely unmoved. Janefalkar wanted evidence that support teams would use it. Early believers emerged, including a small 40-agent group at Fitbit. The first financing arrived in two parts in 2015: $2.6 million, followed by $4 million.
The platform grew beyond that first gesture. Voice, chat, text, photographs and video could coexist. CRM data could remain attached to the interaction. Patents bearing Janefalkar's name covered customer communication pipelines, authentication, peer-to-peer voice and image handling. The point of all that machinery was to make machinery less conspicuous. A customer should be able to show the broken object, preserve the conversation and reach someone who already knows why the conversation began.
Capital followed. GV led a $25 million Series B in 2018. UJET announced a $55 million Series C in 2020, as companies abruptly needed cloud systems that did not depend on everyone sitting in one building. In September 2024, a $76 million Series D led by Sapphire Ventures was aimed at generative AI for contact centers. Janefalkar's line on AI had long been admirably unfashionable: use impactful data, not buzzwords.
The founder learns distribution
UJET's growth did not convert Janefalkar into a believer that good engineering sells itself. Quite the opposite. Asked what he would tell his younger self, he offered a precise correction: put a sales leader among the first five hires, then invest earlier in marketing and channels. A technical founder naturally over-indexes on robustness. Enterprise buyers, being organizations rather than abstract rational actors, also require trust, explanation and repeated contact.
That candor fits his description of the CEO as a “chief enablement officer.” Once a company moves beyond a few dozen people, he argued, the founder's work is to preserve the conditions in which other people succeed. UJET articulated its culture in ordinary verbs: be human, accountable, respectful and transparent; speak up when something is wrong. Janefalkar said the company spent enough time on hiring to become emotionally attached to candidates. The phrase is not standard human-resources prose, which is why it sounds like a person meant it.
His own education in selling had begun earlier than his engineering résumé suggests. One summer job involved selling dial-up internet packages on the streets of Mumbai. The connection between that work and a cloud-software company is less eccentric than it appears. Both require translating invisible infrastructure into a reason for someone to say yes.
Mumbai engineering studies, then telecommunications research at SMU in Dallas.
Motorola: phones, networks, certification, security and the discipline of shipping.
Bay Area and Jawbone: consumer experience, simplicity and products people wanted to touch.
UJET: a prototype, early customers and the first outside financing.
Chairman and chief evangelist: a new role for the original thesis.
Giving up the chair, keeping the argument
In September 2024, Vasili Triant became UJET's co-CEO alongside Janefalkar. Triant had joined in 2020 and run the company's commercial functions as chief operating officer. On April 29, 2025, the arrangement became a handoff. Triant took the CEO job; Janefalkar became chairman of the board and chief evangelist.
For a founder, changing titles can be harder than changing architectures. The company had been the container for his observation, his prototype and nearly ten years of operating decisions. Yet the transition also matched something he had said about leadership: the work is to position people for success. Triant's job became scaling distribution and partnerships. Janefalkar's became carrying the product conviction outward while guiding the board.
The conviction has remained remarkably consistent. People do not communicate in channels; they communicate in moments. A call becomes a text, then a photograph, then another call. Friends tolerate the zigzag because the context survives. Companies turned each mode into a queue and called the collection omnichannel. Janefalkar wanted the fluidity, not merely the inventory.
There is an appealing symmetry in the journey. A child sees a car phone and wonders how the signal travels. An engineer learns to make devices reliable, then discovers that reliability without ease is only half a product. A founder notices his name being lost between systems and builds a company to keep context attached. Finally, a chairman steps away from day-to-day control while continuing to argue for the same thing he wanted from the beginning: technology that makes human communication easier.
“You're a product of your relationships and experiences.”Anand Janefalkar
He has said that if he could start a movement, it would expand access to STEM education. He also prefers learning from people who have lived a problem to relying solely on books. Both positions make sense from his story. Janefalkar's career has been a series of transferred lessons: research into devices, devices into experience, experience into software, founder into evangelist. The signal travels because somebody carries it.