Baskar Agneeswaran and the good idea that did not fit

Baskar Agneeswaran and his friends had built an app to find a bargain. The expensive part was discovering what it would take to keep the thing running. Prizap, their price-comparison venture, needed a continuing supply of product information from large retailers. An attractive screen could show the answer. Behind it, an enormous amount of work had to produce an answer worth showing.

Agneeswaran was a chartered accountant drawn to technology. His collaborators understood mobile development and selling software. Their consumer app, however, depended on a demanding data operation. They had placed the most difficult work outside their strongest capabilities. It is an awkward discovery for any founding team: being able to build an app does not mean being equipped to run the business inside it.

The next venture would retain the useful part of that experience. They understood more about online retail. They knew how to make mobile apps. Merchants needed those apps. Vajro, now Superfans.io, grew from putting those three observations together. Years later, after leading Vajro through an $8.5 million funding round, Agneeswaran would make another adjustment to the shape of his working life. This time, the product would include sentences.

A bargain app with an expensive middle

The early connection was a friendship with a much younger builder. In 2013, Agneeswaran was talking with Niwin Santhosh, who had been developing for Microsoft's app ecosystem. Agneeswaran credits Niwin with helping him find his way into technology. Their backgrounds offered different kinds of usefulness: an accountant's familiarity with business and a developer's ability to make software work.

By 2015, the team was working on Prizap for American shoppers. It would compare deals across retailers including Amazon, Walmart and eBay. The appeal was easy to explain. The operational burden was harder to appreciate before they were carrying it. Prices and products had to be gathered, processed and kept useful. The little app on the customer's phone was the visible tip of a considerably less little undertaking.

Agneeswaran has described the backend work as outsourced, leaving the team with limited control over the activity doing much of the heavy lifting. They spent roughly two years on the venture. Eventually, they acknowledged that bringing it up to the standard it needed would be beyond their resources as a bootstrapped business.

There is a temptation to decorate such moments with revelation. His own recollection is more ordinary, and more useful. The founders examined what had happened. They distinguished the market they had learned about from the machinery they could competently operate. They could keep the knowledge without keeping the original product.

A smaller promise, made useful

Vajro gave merchants a way to turn an online store into a mobile shopping app. The merchant could arrange familiar components such as banners, image grids and countdowns through a visual builder. That approach put work previously associated with a custom development project into a product that a retailer could use directly.

Agneeswaran described the intention plainly: “We wanted to democratize app-building and hand the control over to businesses themselves.” The wording places the shopkeeper at the centre of the design. A small retailer should be able to decide how the shop appears on a phone without first acquiring a working knowledge of software development.

The team initially worked with the Kartrocket commerce ecosystem before moving to Shopify in 2018. A marketplace gave the product a setting where merchants were already looking for software. The early price of $25 a month encouraged installs and reviews. For a company trying to earn attention, each working store could become evidence for the next merchant considering the app.

That shift changed several things together: the customer, the distribution channel and the team's relationship to its own expertise. Mobile development became central to the value being sold. Retailers could use their existing Shopify businesses as the starting point. The founders had found a way to make their experience travel further, without rebuilding the entire world around it.

What the hour-long app leaves out

By January 2022, the company's pitch was that a merchant could build a native Android or iOS shopping app in 60 minutes or less. That is an appealing number. It also compresses a much longer set of decisions about what retailers need after an app has been assembled.

In conversation about growing to 2,500 customers, Agneeswaran discussed integrations with other Shopify tools, relationships with resellers and merchant communities, and the usefulness of a 60-day trial. These are practical concerns. An app has to fit the shop's other systems. A merchant needs enough time to see whether it helps. Customers who arrive must have reasons to stay.

He also identified churn as a major challenge. It is a revealing admission beside the pleasing speed of the product demonstration. A fast setup can win a trial; continued usefulness has to earn the subscription again. The business of selling software therefore extends well past the moment the software first works.

His public writing reached into the merchant's changing tools, too. In January 2022, he wrote about technologies shaping mobile commerce; later that year, he discussed augmented and virtual reality in online retail. The subjects fit the day job. Once a retailer has an app, the questions turn to what can happen inside it, and what makes the experience worth returning to.

“There wasn’t really an aha moment, to be honest.”

Baskar Agneeswaran, on the origins of Vajro

The money came with a floor plan

On January 24, 2022, Vajro announced $8.5 million in Series A funding from Five Elms Capital. Agneeswaran was CEO. The investment would support further development of the platform and proposed integrations with additional commerce systems. The announcement described a business with 150 employees, a considerable distance from the original small founding group.

In Chennai, expansion had a physical address and a measurable footprint. Agneeswaran said the company had taken 27,000 square feet in Perungudi, on Old Mahabalipuram Road, with room for 350 people. Developers would account for a significant part of the workforce, alongside sales, support and marketing teams. The funding story had desks attached.

At that point, Vajro reported more than 2,200 brands across over 150 countries. Its Indian customers included House of Masaba and FreeCultr. Those figures describe the company's reach at the funding announcement, rather than a present-day customer count. They also show how a Chennai-based team could build a business around retailers operating far beyond its own city.

The company's recruiting material later put its progress into recurring-revenue milestones: $1 million in September 2020, $2 million in February 2021 and $4 million in August 2022. These were company-reported markers. Read together, they explain why a partnerships role could carry real weight: growth required more people and relationships capable of bringing the product to merchants.

An accountant's objection to the endless runway

Agneeswaran's advice to other founders often returns to a question of fit. A promising market still needs a team suited to serving it. Prizap had taught him that lesson at close range. Choosing a business involves examining the founders as carefully as the opportunity.

Then comes the money. He uses the phrase “infinite runway” for the ambition to get a business to the point where continued operation does not depend on the next fundraising round. Raising capital should help it grow, in his account, while moving towards break-even gives the founders more control over their choices.

It is a recognisable concern from someone trained in accountancy: how long can the enterprise keep paying for itself? The advice also gives the funding milestone a useful companion. A large cheque is an event. A business that can support its activity has acquired a different kind of freedom. Both matter in his description of building a company.

His interests have also extended beyond merchants' apps. He co-founded Rapid Acceleration Partners, or RAP, with Raghuraman Ramamurthy and Ramesh Kumar. A 2017 partnership announcement already placed him in enterprise automation, discussing operational efficiency and cost savings. His later interest in AI has a business history behind it.

A founder tries the blank page

By November 2025, Agneeswaran was describing a more personal project: building a writing career in public. He said he had stepped away from the CEO role while continuing to work full-time at Vajro. The current Superfans leadership page lists him as co-founder and Niwin as co-founder and CEO.

He had completed a manuscript called Building AI First and was considering self-publishing after approaching publishers. Another planned book, Learn to Use AI Like a Pro, addressed individual professionals and solo operators. The titles describe projects he discussed; the more interesting development is his willingness to become a beginner again, this time in publishing.

His personal site presents the AIravat Framework and an AI Maturity Model, tools intended to help people and businesses move beyond experiments. Meanwhile, Superfans now emphasises customer relationships, community and reasons to open an app between purchases. Across those activities runs a continuing interest in making technology useful enough to become part of somebody's routine.

There are routines beyond work, too. In a podcast conversation, Agneeswaran named family time, table tennis and carrom among his pleasures. The games make a pleasing change of scale after all those platforms, countries and subscriptions. The next point is close enough to see.

His career has advanced through adjustments in what he chooses to build: a consumer app, merchant software, enterprise automation, a manuscript. The failure of Prizap supplied an early reason to reconsider. The writing project suggests he is still willing to do so after success. There is something companionable about that willingness. A founder can spend years learning his strengths and still leave room for a new game.