Jaibir Nihal Singh and the art of being believed

Before Jaibir Nihal Singh sold employers on background checks, he tried selling a restaurant manager on metal straws. He was a college student in California, pitching Nobu, and the answer was no. A media venture followed, with calls to advertisers to sell podcast spots. That did not work either. These are the less glamorous entries in the founder’s catalogue: small ideas, actual customers, an awkward gap between the two.

Singh now co-leads TraqCheck, which builds AI agents for recruitment and background verification. He also makes videos as heyjns, playing with the manners and absurdities of affluent Delhi. A person can encounter him through an enterprise software pitch or a joke about inherited status. The audiences arrive with different expectations. He has spent years learning how to hold both.

His account of those college ventures gives the story a useful starting point. He wanted control over his time. The straw pitch and the advertising calls were early attempts to get there. Starting a company would eventually give that wish a much longer to-do list.

The pitch before the product

Singh has described beginning TraqCheck at 22 in his grandmother’s living room in Delhi. The founding team included Armaan Mehta and Rishabh Jain. The company dates to 2020. In the familiar compressed version of an entrepreneurial biography, the next stop would be funding. A good deal of persuading sat in between.

Early approaches to established businesses often ended in a polite dismissal. The team worked for a considerable period without external funding, refining the product around users and winning business through recommendations. Singh’s account of those years centres on the difficulty of getting young founders taken seriously inside organisations accustomed to doing things their own way.

A prospective customer already has a process, however tiresome. Changing it creates work. Someone must explain the replacement, answer the questions and accept responsibility for trying it. For a young company, a better demonstration still has to earn a place in the diary. Singh’s creative confidence had found a rather demanding audience.

Customer advocacy helped. A recommendation from someone already using the service could carry the conversation further than another unsolicited pitch. That gives his early sales story its particular texture: repeated approaches, practical proof, then someone willing to tell the next customer. The work travelled by a route older than the technology.

“We don’t need the day. We only need a few minutes.”Jaibir Nihal Singh, recalling an early bank demonstration

An education in holding attention

Singh graduated from Pepperdine University’s Seaver College in 2020 after studying media production. He had expected to enter entertainment. His experience included internships with Emmay Entertainment and Motion Pictures and India Take One Productions, contributing to projects including Extraction. His eventual move into software brought those production skills into campaigns, investor pitches and public appearances.

The division of labour among the founders mattered. Jain brought a program for querying records; Mehta brought economics and investing experience; Singh brought creative development and marketing. His part in the business makes the film degree easier to understand. Explaining an unfamiliar product, arranging a campaign and getting an audience to follow an idea all give that training a practical use.

There was already evidence that he liked making programmes rather than simply watching them. As a student, he worked on Pepperdine’s NewsWaves production team and was executive producer of a campus talk show. A 2019 campus profile also recorded a video podcast project with two fellow students. Production was an activity, with collaborators and things to finish.

The habit continued. In 2022, Singh co-hosted Opposite Ends with actor Joseph Baena. Its seven published episodes wandered through acting, business and entertainment. Guests included casting director Farrah West, streetwear entrepreneur Cena Barhaghi and former NFL player Vernon Davis. The range suggests someone comfortable letting a conversation cross occupational borders.

By February 2025, he was on the other side of the microphone on Dostcast. The conversation moved between personal branding, raising capital, family, Malibu, film cameras and Succession. Even the episode’s running order resists putting him in a single professional drawer. The company and the camera kept sharing the desk.

The paperwork had a plot

The business Singh entered concerns a part of hiring that rarely gets the celebratory photograph. An employer chooses a candidate, then needs to establish whether the records support the application. Education, past employment and identity may all require checks. The offer is exciting. The correspondence that follows can be considerably less so.

In his 2023 explanation of TraqCheck’s approach, Singh described the separate jobs involved: obtaining candidate details, organising them, contacting institutions and previous employers, and compiling a report. The company’s proposition was to automate more of those handoffs. For large customers, it could connect with their existing HR system; smaller customers could request checks through a web dashboard.

That integration was a specific part of the pitch. A hiring team running large numbers of checks should be able to receive results in the system it already uses. Reducing the number of places someone has to copy information makes the product easier to picture. The useful unit of progress is a completed task.

His 2024 interviews placed the company among more than 200 corporate customers and described plans to enter the UK. He talked about in-house automation and GPT agents working on backend tasks. Remote recruitment, he argued, increased the need for employers to verify people they might never meet in an office.

Those explanations are more revealing than the broad label “AI company”. They show the operational problem he was selling against: repeated requests for information, disconnected systems and a hiring decision waiting for an answer. The language of the company would grow more expansive. The original sales conversation had a very concrete clock running through it.

Delhi, with the volume turned up

On Instagram, Singh works with another set of recognisable signals. His comedy draws on the wealthy Delhi world he grew up in: schools, farmhouses, clubs, family businesses and the elaborate business of seeming unbothered by money. Knowing the setting gives him details that a visitor might miss.

He attended Vasant Valley School and grew up first in Defence Colony, then near Chhatarpur. His great-grandfather, Gurmukh Nihal Singh, was Delhi’s second chief minister and Rajasthan’s first governor. There is a family name on a Delhi road. That inheritance supplies some of the material he exaggerates for the camera.

The comedy depends on recognition. Viewers can enjoy the behaviour, wince at it or recognise their own circle in it. Singh has pointed to The Gstaad Guy as a reference for humour built from the habits of the rich. His version has a Delhi vocabulary and an insider’s feel for the small distinctions people take terribly seriously.

There is a business overlap, too. Singh has recounted Nikhil Kamath recognising TraqCheck’s name after seeing his videos. Familiarity can reach a room before its subject does. It is a useful consequence of being funny, although the software still has to do its own work when the conversation turns to buying.

A bigger cast of digital colleagues

In April 2026, TraqCheck announced an $8 million Series A led by IvyCap Ventures, with participation from IIFL. The stated uses included European expansion, enterprise adoption and development of its autonomous hiring agents. The company was moving from its initial verification focus into a broader part of recruitment.

Trace is the background-screening agent. Nina is the conversational sourcing agent, designed to find candidates, engage them and bring qualified people to hiring managers. Together they explain the company’s ambition to cover more of the journey from discovering a candidate to checking their records.

By this stage, TraqCheck had moved its headquarters to London while keeping a New Delhi office. Singh was co-CEO with Mehta and had been recognised on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia AI list in 2025. The UK expansion plan included increasing the local team to 25 people. That was an announced target, with the work of recruiting and expansion still attached.

In explaining the direction, Singh has described hiring teams working with digital colleagues and relying less on dashboards. It is an ambition that reaches beyond speeding up one check. The company calls its broader approach a human operating system. Whether a customer embraces that language or simply wants fewer administrative delays, the practical test remains the work completed.

Singh has also spoken about bringing opportunities back to Pepperdine, hoping to employ students and alumni as the company looks towards the US. It would connect the campus where he learned production to the business in which he now uses it.

The student with metal straws wanted someone to buy an idea. The founder wants employers to trust a process. The comedian wants viewers to recognise the scene before the joke lands. Each audience asks something different of him. Singh keeps turning up with another pitch, and the film graduate keeps finding work.