The operator who decided reality needed an upgrade
Most chemical engineers end up optimizing processes. Malhar Patil chose to optimize perception. The Co-Founder and COO of Flam - the AI-native mixed reality platform used by Google, Samsung, Emirates, and 100+ other global brands - spent his early career learning how enterprise systems work and where they break. Oracle taught him the machinery. Stepathlon taught him how to sell. BITS Pilani gave him three collaborators who would change his life.
When Patil, Shourya Agarwal, and Amit Gaiki launched Flam in 2021, mixed reality was still largely a novelty - something you saw in niche art installations or novelty Snapchat filters. What the team saw differently was the delivery problem. Every existing AR experience required an app download, suffered from slow load times, and reached only a fraction of intended audiences. The founders' thesis was simple: if content is the destination, the friction of getting there is the problem. Solve that, and you have a platform.
Patil, who describes himself as a "strategy and GTM person," took on the operational and commercial side of the business - the job of convincing brands to bet on technology that hadn't yet proved itself at scale. He had done this before: at Stepathlon, he managed south India sales for one of the country's largest corporate fitness challenges. At Oracle, he advised financial services firms on enterprise transformation. Neither role was an obvious stepping stone to co-founding an immersive tech company. Which is, arguably, the point.
Flam has grown rapidly to power 80+ global and large-scale brands with MR infra in just a matter of months. Marquee brands and tech companies such as Google, Flipkart, Samsung, Emirates, LG, Wargaming deploying Flam's AI is a testament to our enterprise grade infrastructure.
- Malhar Patil, Co-Founder & COO, FlamWhat came next is the kind of growth that makes early believers look prescient and everyone else look slow. Flam's platform now reaches 380 million users. Its mixed reality experiences load in under 300 milliseconds. The $14M Series A it closed in May 2025 - led by RTP Global, with participation from Dovetail - brought total funding to $22M and validated a market position that only three years ago was being built on borrowed time and a 10-month runway.
In 2022, with funding markets turning hostile, the Flam team made a decisive pivot from consumer to enterprise. The consumer app they had built was technically impressive. The audience was not yet ready to adopt it as a habit. Enterprise clients, on the other hand, had budgets, briefs, and an urgent need to make digital advertising more engaging. The pivot wasn't an admission of failure - it was an act of reading the room.
"Non-mistakes are the experiences that look like failures until the day they don't."
Malhar Patil - TEDxISBRBangalore, August 2022Four BITS Pilani friends and a bet on the next content format
The founding team of Flam did not meet in a co-working space or at a pitch event. They met at BITS Pilani, one of India's most competitive engineering institutions, where Patil studied chemical engineering and his co-founders pursued computer science. All four were involved in the same entrepreneurial and technical clubs on campus - the overlap of interests that often precedes a company.
Their original thesis was about content evolution. Text gave way to images. Images gave way to short video. Short video gave way to what, exactly? The founding team believed the answer was immersive, interactive experiences - content you could move through, not just watch. Their first product reflected that ambition: a consumer app with avatar systems, motion capture technology, and the ability to make printed photos come alive when scanned.
The technology was ahead of user readiness. In 2022, with runway shrinking and the funding market in a freeze, the founders faced a decision familiar to anyone who has built a startup: wait for the world to catch up, or find the place where the world already needs what you have. Flam chose the latter. The pivot to enterprise advertising - letting brands publish mixed reality experiences through QR codes and links rather than app downloads - turned a technically impressive consumer product into a commercially viable platform. Three of the four founders made the Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 list that same year.
The detail that tends to get glossed over: Flam was not just doing augmented reality overlays. The platform built a native content bundle that achieved 100% Android device compatibility and instant loading via QR code scanning. For brands targeting mass audiences across India, the Middle East, Japan, and the United States, this was the difference between a campaign that worked and one that didn't.
A short list of things that actually happened
What Flam actually does - and why that's harder than it sounds
The pitch for Flam sounds simple: scan a QR code, see a mixed reality experience. A Samsung Galaxy phone floats in your living room. A Tanishq jewelry piece appears on your wrist. A Mahindra SUV materializes in your driveway. The user does not download an app. The experience loads in under 300 milliseconds. The brand gets real-time analytics on what worked and what was skipped.
The engineering behind this is considerably less simple. Flam's platform runs on proprietary AI image recognition trained on more than five million assets. It achieves sub-100ms rendering on smartphones. It supports 6 billion+ devices without requiring any downloads. The company has filed patents for hyper-personalized augmented reality content using contextual algorithms, for AI motion capture, and for its proprietary "Flam scannable codes."
The 2025 AI suite adds another layer: Fable 2.0 (a flow matching diffusion transformer for generating RGBA content with dynamic motion), Fantom 1.0 (identity-preserving video synthesis from a single face image and audio), and Falcon 1.0 (a 30B parameter language model for personality-aware responses). Together they constitute what Flam calls a "GenAI tool-chain" - the ability for a brand to create, personalize, and publish experiences at scale, without a team of 3D artists.
Patil's role in this architecture is less about pixels and more about pipelines - the commercial and operational infrastructure that turns technical capability into client outcomes. He has helped businesses from India expand into the US market, navigating the gap between building something impressive and making something that enterprises will pay for. At Flam, those two things finally came together.
From consulting to coding reality
The talk about not calling things mistakes
In August 2022, Patil stood in front of an audience at TEDxISBRBangalore and made a case for reframing the narrative of failure. The talk, titled "Non-Mistakes in Your Life," drew on his own trajectory - a middle-class background, a chemical engineering degree in a career spent nowhere near chemical engineering, jobs in consulting and corporate wellness before landing in mixed reality - and argued that these apparent detours were not errors. They were inputs.
The philosophy is not motivational-poster stuff. It is operational. Every role Patil held before Flam taught him something he would use directly: Oracle gave him a map of how enterprises buy technology. Stepathlon showed him how to close deals in competitive markets. ZS Associates gave him the habit of working from data before forming conviction. Even the involvement with Jagriti Yatra - a 15-day train journey across India focused on social entrepreneurship - broadened his view of what problems are worth solving and at what scale.
The talk arrived at a moment when the company itself was navigating its own apparent mistake: a product pivot that looked, from the outside, like a retreat. Flam's pivot from consumer to enterprise was actually the moment the company's strategy clicked into place. Non-mistake, precisely.
A few things you won't find in the press release
When Flam's runway was down to roughly 10 months in 2022 and the funding market was frozen, the founders chose not to wait. They pivoted from consumer to enterprise in one of the highest-stakes calls any early-stage team can make - and it turned out to be the decision that made everything else possible.
Patil is a national-level badminton player. The sport rewards fast reflexes, court intelligence, and the ability to read an opponent's patterns before they complete the shot. His colleagues might tell you this description applies equally well to the way he runs GTM strategy.
The four founding members of Flam were not just classmates at BITS Pilani - they were all active in the same entrepreneurial and technical clubs on campus. The company, in a very real sense, started forming years before anyone formally incorporated it.
Flam powered mixed reality experiences for Kamala Harris's US presidential campaign - making the platform one of the very few Indian startups to touch a US national election at the level of voter engagement technology.