Pankaj Tripathi met Pankaj Tripathi at IIFA in Abu Dhabi. One was the actor; the other was the founder and CEO of Vernost. The technology company's account celebrated its chief executive's encounter with his namesake as a fan moment. For once, a customer-engagement business had a particularly straightforward demonstration of the emotion it spends its working life trying to understand.
There is a pleasing complication here. Tripathi builds technology for businesses whose customers usually know somebody else's name. The bank gets the recognition. The airline gets the complaint. The hotel gets the return booking. Vernost supplies systems underneath those relationships, linking loyalty programmes, travel services and payments. Its founder can spend a career helping brands be remembered while remaining comparatively anonymous himself.
The namesake coincidence is memorable because recognition is part of the business. A person wants to be understood in context: as a guest, a regular, a supporter or a fan. Tripathi's different ventures put that question in different rooms, from an enterprise meeting to the stands at a cricket match.
The encounter offers an inviting way into his story. Alongside the enterprise software business, there is a cricket franchise acquired with a fellow entrepreneur, a partnership with a film-awards organisation and a sustained interest in how people form attachments. Read together, those episodes suggest a question running through his work: how does an occasional visitor become someone who wants to return?
A small office, a long customer journey
Tripathi and Darshana Jagtap began Vernost's journey in 2014. The business started in a small office in Mumbai, working in a field with a deceptively domestic concern: remembering people. Retailers, airlines and hotels wanted to recognise customers across an expanding collection of digital encounters. The customer could see one brand; behind it, several pieces of software might be having a rather difficult conversation.
By 2017, Tripathi was describing a marketing suite that followed people from guest users to members, through referrals, games, loyalty and redemption. He talked about understanding behaviour at each stage. Gift cards and stored value were part of the offering, too, with transaction tracking and merchant settlement sitting behind the more visible business of giving somebody a reward.
This early version matters because it shows the continuity beneath the changing technology vocabulary. The ambition already extended beyond issuing points. Acquisition, participation and retention belonged in the same picture. A referral could introduce a customer; a useful reward could give that customer a reason to stay. The work involved both the invitation and what happened after the guest arrived.
An away fixture in Kandy
In October 2021, Tripathi stepped into an arena where loyalty comes with considerably louder feedback. He and Ravi Gupta, founder and CEO of Safexpay, acquired the Kandy franchise in Sri Lanka's Lanka Premier League. The acquisition announcement used the team's existing name, Kandy Tuskers. By the December season, it had become Kandy Warriors.
The pairing brought a payments entrepreneur and a technology entrepreneur into cricket ownership. Tripathi spoke about the competition's appeal to supporters around the world and his anticipation of engaging with them. There was no need for the language of segmentation to explain the attraction. A team offers a shared identity, a calendar and ample opportunities for its followers to have opinions.
His stated hope was refreshingly recognisable: that the team would perform well and get the desired results. Software founders can refine a product release; a cricket match reserves the right to embarrass everyone's forecast. That difference gives the episode its charm. Here was someone professionally concerned with customer relationships taking a stake in a business where the customers might already care more than was comfortable.
“We are eagerly looking forward to engaging with the fans and having a cracker of a season.”
Pankaj Tripathi · on entering the LPL, 2021
Dubai, with room for the people
The next year brought a different kind of expansion. Vernost opened its Middle East regional headquarters in Dubai's Al Barsha neighbourhood. Its clients in the region included Emaar, GEMS Education, Choithram, Elevate Trips and Dadabhai Travels. The new office brought consulting, application development and API services closer to that customer base.
Tripathi's explanation of the move centred on people as well as products. That emphasis had an operational expression: the office would combine relocated Indian colleagues with locally recruited staff. Shyam Iyer, who had previously been responsible for Etihad Airways' loyalty programme, joined as chief commercial officer for MENA; Girish Advani joined as chief strategy officer.
The company also took its gamification module to Arabian Travel Market, where participants could try a Scratch & Win competition. Amid the vocabulary of regional headquarters and enterprise applications, there was a familiar little game. It made a point a demonstration deck could easily labour: participation begins when someone has a reason to try. Tripathi's business was crossing borders while still attending to the small mechanics of an invitation.
When the audience gets a membership
In 2024, Vernost's partnership with IIFA brought the company into film fandom through The Club by IIFA. The membership app offered exclusive material, behind-the-scenes access and updates from the IIFA team. ClubClass, Vernost's loyalty suite, supported the engagement proposition. For a founder who had enjoyed his own namesake encounter, the territory was unusually apt.
An awards ceremony concentrates attention into a short period. An app gives the relationship somewhere to continue afterwards. The distinction is practical: a fan can return for content, take part and keep up with the event without waiting for the next ceremony. Tripathi described the aim as bringing audiences closer to IIFA through digital experiences that connect the event with fans around the world.
By July 2026, the app's listing described voting, interviews, event highlights and green-carpet moments, alongside a refreshed homepage and easier access to videos, blogs, events and travel. These are modestly concrete details in a business often described through large abstractions. They show what an ongoing relationship actually asks of a product: another useful or enjoyable thing to do when somebody opens it.
The reward must survive the checkout
Tripathi's public writing supplies the reasoning behind that product direction. In August 2025, he argued for loyalty shaped by data and artificial intelligence, with more attention to relevance and individual preferences. He described systems that could recognise a customer at risk of leaving, choose an appropriate incentive and decide when a message might be useful.
The interesting shift is in the unit of attention. A points balance can be counted. A person's next need has to be interpreted. His argument puts a premium on signals from interactions and on connecting them across the systems a business uses. It also brings difficult judgement into the picture: an incentive has a moment when it is welcome, and plenty of moments when it is merely another interruption.
In May 2026, he turned to the connections themselves, arguing that API design belongs on the leadership agenda. His example was a frequent flyer trying to exchange points for a hotel booking. If the systems cannot communicate, the customer's trust suffers. The promise printed on the reward has to survive the machinery of redeeming it.
For Tripathi, modular systems let businesses introduce capabilities without rebuilding everything around them. The executive responsibility extends to partnerships and shared standards. A customer has little reason to applaud the integration work, of course. Success may look like an entirely uneventful booking. There is a particular discipline in building something whose most satisfactory performance attracts no attention at all.
A seat near the conversation
By June 2026, Tripathi was writing about engagement infrastructure: the systems that let businesses maintain useful, continuing interactions with people. His argument widened from individual transactions to connected platforms and communities, including environments where participants contribute value themselves. The ambition was for technology to accommodate relationships that develop over time.
That summer, the entertainment connection continued. In August, Vernost's partnership with IIFA Connex placed the company alongside a discussion of music, audiences and technology. The third edition considered how artists, platforms and listeners influence discovery and success. Tripathi spoke about technology's capacity to deepen connections between consumers, brands, content and experiences.
His involvement in TiE Mumbai, which lists him among its charter members, adds another point on that map of relationships. The entrepreneur who builds systems for companies also participates in a network of entrepreneurs. His work moves between product design, business partnerships and places where people gather because they share an interest. Those settings give the otherwise abstract word engagement some human company.
The next visit is the test
There is a tempting way to describe this career as a march through software categories: marketing technology, loyalty, travel, payments, artificial intelligence. The more revealing thread is a recurring practical problem. People arrive with expectations. A business has to remember enough, connect enough and deliver enough to make the next encounter worthwhile.
Cricket makes that desire visible in supporters. Cinema makes it visible in fans. A bank or hotel may express it more quietly, through another transaction or another stay. These relationships differ, and the record does not require them to be reduced to one formula. But together they explain why Tripathi's story has room for both application interfaces and an excited meeting with an actor.
The fan moment is a useful place to leave him. For a brief encounter, the founder was on the receiving end of the feeling his industry discusses at length. He wanted to meet someone whose work he enjoyed. A photograph and a company post marked the occasion. Beneath all the platforms, programmes and plans for what comes next, there remains that very ordinary pleasure: being glad you showed up.