In February 2014, Ankit Prasad discovered that someone interesting had signed up for TouchTalent, the creative community he had cofounded. The new user was Sachin Bansal, cofounder of Flipkart. Prasad sent an email thanking him and asked for his mobile number. A conversation followed, lasting about ten minutes. Three months later, Sachin and Binny Bansal invested. As origin stories go, it has pleasingly little ceremony. An entrepreneur noticed a customer and said hello.
The episode fits a career spent trying to reduce the distance between people and their ideas. TouchTalent gave artists somewhere to put their work. Bobble, the business that followed, gave ordinary messages a face, a joke, a familiar turn of phrase. Prasad’s route through technology has involved several changes of format. The interest in expression has been unusually consistent.
The boy who answered “Bill Gates”
Prasad grew up in Chaibasa, Jharkhand. Asked what he wanted to become, he would answer “Bill Gates”. Children are rarely troubled by the distinction between an occupation and a particular billionaire. In this case, the answer came with access to the machinery: his father brought a computer home in 1995.
The family later moved to Jamshedpur, where his father, Ranjit Prasad, became a geology professor at NIT. Ankit and his older brother Rahul had begun school in Chaibasa before moving to DAV School in Jamshedpur. Learning in English required an adjustment; mathematics offered a subject in which the language barrier mattered less.
By their teens, the brothers were building websites for local businesses. Restaurants, hotels and service providers were early customers. This was a practical introduction to technology: somebody needed a site, somebody had to make it, and eventually somebody paid. His 2014 conference biography records a profitable technology venture by sixteen. The boy with an ambitious answer had acquired a rather more useful habit: shipping work.
A hostel room with other plans
Prasad entered IIT Delhi in 2008 to study Mathematics and Computing. The institution offered a prestigious destination. He kept finding reasons to look beyond it. His student years included work with startups, and the demands of professional deadlines increasingly competed with the timetable of classes.
There was plenty of participation in campus life, too. His contemporary biography lists awards for Best Fresher, hostel representation and editing. It also mentions writing scripts and making videos in his spare time. That combination helps explain the later product choices. Here was someone interested in engineering who also wanted to make things people would watch, share or enjoy.
He left IIT Delhi in 2012 without completing the degree. The useful detail is what he was leaving for. With Mohammed Wasim, he was building TouchTalent, an online community for creative people. A painter could display a painting; a photographer could build a portfolio. Work that might otherwise remain unseen could find an audience.
The project had been tested with a Facebook page before its website arrived. By 2013, it offered nineteen categories of work and drew visitors from more than 150 countries. Prasad handled the website. The ambitions were wider than uploading pictures: the founders wanted artists to gain visibility and eventually earn from their creations.
“In those days, making a website was a big thing.”
Ankit Prasad, recalling his early business
In June 2014, TouchTalent raised $700,000 in a round led by SAIF Partners with angel investors. The hostel-room venture now had outside backing. Yet an audience and an investment did not settle the harder question of what sort of business it could become. TouchTalent gained attention, then ran into the limits of its market. The next move would take creativity out of the portfolio and into the conversation.
The sticker needed a better address
Bobble began in 2015 with an appealing piece of digital vanity: turn a selfie into a cartoon face, then use that face in stickers and GIFs. Your expression could accompany your message. The internet already had plenty of images to borrow; this gave the joke a recognisable owner.
A standalone sticker app, however, required a special trip. The team wanted the product closer to the place where people were already talking. In March 2016, Bobble relaunched as a keyboard. That change made the content available while users composed messages, across the apps in which those messages would be sent.
- 2012The portfolioGive creative work a place.
- 2015The stickerPut a face in the message.
- 2016The keyboardBring it to the conversation.
The distinction sounds small until you consider the number of times a phone owner opens a keyboard. A sticker library must be remembered. A keyboard is already waiting. Prasad’s product had moved into a position where expression could become an ordinary part of writing, rather than an extra errand.
There were less glamorous duties attached to that address. A keyboard must let people type comfortably. A 2017 hands-on review enjoyed Bobble’s personalised GIFs but found its word correction less advanced than SwiftKey and Gboard. The criticism gets to the bargain beneath the amusement: a funny sticker earns a smile; reliable typing earns another day on the phone.
Autocorrect meets the way people talk
Prasad’s upbringing makes the attention to language particularly resonant. He had experienced the effort of adjusting to English at school. His company was now building for people whose everyday communication might move between languages within the same sentence.
By 2020, Bobble was working on autocorrect in India’s official languages and colloquial forms, including Hinglish. Its approach emphasised how an individual communicated. A keyboard designed around formal spelling alone can become an officious little editor. In a conversation among friends, the unofficial version may be exactly the right one.
Personalisation also connected the technical work to the original sticker idea. A person’s face, a familiar expression and a local joke all help a message sound as though it belongs to its sender. The engineering problem becomes more interesting when correctness includes tone and familiarity.
Recognition followed. Prasad joined Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Asia class in 2018; the profile then described a product with more than fifteen million users. In 2021, he and Rahul appeared together in Fortune India’s 40 Under 40. Their teenage collaboration had become a company with an audience considerably larger than the local website customers they started with.
Users reported in Fortune India’s 2021 profile of the brothers. A user count, rather than a measure of daily activity.
When a joke carries the business
The financial challenge was less photogenic. People could enjoy a free keyboard indefinitely without becoming paying customers. Fortune’s 2021 account recorded $500,000 in FY21 revenue and a renewed focus on monetisation from the previous August. Reach had arrived earlier than meaningful income.
Prasad saw an opportunity in the content passing between people. Bobble’s own branded stickers helped introduce the product to their recipients. Other brands might want a similar place in the exchange. A shareable image could carry a commercial message inside something a person had chosen to send.
In interviews, he described brands entering conversations through stickers, GIFs, emojis and other expressive formats. That proposition depends on taste as much as targeting. The branded joke has to be worth passing on. A conversation is a fairly unforgiving venue for material that nobody actually wants to say.
By 2024, he was describing both expression tools and productivity features: translation, suggested replies, email composition and summarisation. The keyboard’s position offered a convenient place to use them. Instead of visiting another app to perform a small task, a user could ask for help where the writing was already happening.
Memes between meetings
His own phone serves as a testing ground. In a 2024 interview about life outside work, Prasad named the smartphone as his favourite gadget and described trying Bobble features himself. He also admitted to fitting chats, emojis and memes between meetings. A keyboard founder can, at least, claim that sending a joke has professional relevance.
Away from the screen, he spoke about reading, meeting people and visiting Bali, where he enjoys the food, temples and local art. His viewing choices included Shark Tank and Moneyball. Even the entertainment, it seems, leaves a little room for a business decision.
The ambition underneath the keys
In a November 2025 interview, Prasad put Bobble’s audience above one hundred million users. He also described rising use of voice input and an audience increasingly drawn from smaller cities and rural India. These were his reported figures, and his account of where the product was finding a place.
His argument was cultural as well as technical. People mix languages, images and familiar references to communicate belonging. A keyboard that understands those habits has more work to do than predicting the next correctly spelt word. It has to leave room for the ways people recognise one another.
He has spoken about a future in which every smartphone has a native AI assistant. That is a much larger ambition than cartoon stickers. Yet the starting position is recognisable: help someone do something expressive or useful without making them leave the conversation.
Prasad has called fearlessness an influence on his professional decisions, including leaving IIT and starting Bobble. His earlier account of family support adds another dimension. His parents allowed him to choose an unconventional route even when relatives struggled to understand it. The decision was his; the room to make it mattered.
One of his more revealing anecdotes concerns his mother. She did not fully understand the business or its revenue, he said, but used his keyboard to communicate. There is an appealing economy to that verdict. After the degree left unfinished, the investor calls, the product changes and the lists, a family member had simply found a use for the thing he made.
The first thank-you email to Sachin Bansal was a small act of attention. The keyboard asks for that attention at a much larger scale: to the language someone chooses, the image they want to send, the joke that works among friends. Prasad began by giving creative people a place to show their work. He has spent the years since moving the tools closer to everyone else’s fingertips.